IntegrationTest of rails app does not see rack middleware updates

I am currently trying to integration test a rails 2.3.8 app that uses the open_id_authentication plugin, which in turn uses the rack-openid middleware to detect a 401 unauthorized response and turn it into a redirect to the openid provider for validation.

In the integration test, I would like to use an assert_response 303 for the openid redirect, but currently it fails as the assert_response sees the 401 response of the rails app, rather than the modified 303 response from the rack middleware.

After changing http://github.com/rails/rails/blob/2-3-stable/actionpack/lib/action... to drop through to the else clause, the integration test works again. However, I don't have enough knowledge of rails to know what the correct fix is, or indeed if I am doing something wrong and this is the intended way of working.

However, the fact that there are a couple of inconsistencies with some parts of the testing framework seeing the rack responses and some the rails responses, I suspect this is an error in rails and thus I would like to raise the issue here for someone more knowledgeable to have a look

Thank you