treat new records with equivalent attributes as equivalent (==)

If I want to specify that the 'new' action in my AccountsController assigns a new Account to @account, I'd instinctively do this:

get :new
assigns[:account].should == Account.new

and expect this controller code to pass that code example:

def new
  @account = Account.new
end

But this fails because ActiveRecord::Base doesn't treat new records as equivalent (==), regardless of the values of their attributes.

$ script/console
$ Account.new == Account.new
=> false
$ Role.new(:name => 'admin') == Role.new(:name => 'admin')
=> false

This means that the simple example above has to be more complex. Here's the solution I see most often (in my code and in others, regardless of testing and mocking frameworks used):

account = Account.new
Account.should_receive(:new).and(account)
get :new
assigns[:account].should == account

I think a reasonable approach would be to treat new records as equivalent (==) as long as they are both new records and have equivalent attributes (self.attributes == other.attributes).

This would make all of my rspec code examples much, much, much cleaner and less brittle, and I'm quite sure I'm not alone.

Now I'll admit that changing the meaning of == might seem to pose significant risk, but I made the change and the activerecord unittest suite still passes. The change only affects new records, and I can't imagine there would be many, if any, cases where application code would actually behave differently due to this change.

But that's just me :) I'm sure I'm not thinking of something.

In any case, solution can be found at http://github.com/dchelimsky/rai...>