When administrators disabled features and users tried to access them
with the browser, we were responding with a 500 "Internal Server Error"
page, which in my humble opinion was incorrect. There was no error at
all; the server worked exactly as expected.
I think a 403 "Forbidden" code is better; since that feature is
disabled, we're refusing to let users access it.
We could also respond with a 404 "Not found", although I wonder whether
that'll be confusing when administrators temporarily or accidentally
disable a feature.
A similar thing might happen if we responded with a 410 "Gone" code.
Actually this case might be more confusing since users aren't that
familiar with this code.
In any case, all these options are better than the 500 error.
JavaScript is used by about 98% of web users, so by testing without it
enabled, we're only testing that the application works for a very
reduced number of users.
We proceeded this way in the past because CONSUL started using Rails 4.2
and truncating the database between JavaScript tests with database
cleaner, which made these tests terribly slow.
When we upgraded to Rails 5.1 and introduced system tests, we started
using database transactions in JavaScript tests, making these tests much
faster. So now we can use JavaScript tests everywhere without critically
slowing down our test suite.
This menu requires JavaScript to open/close subnavigation menus, so
we're now testing the way users with a browser supporting JavaScript
(98%-99% of the users) deal with the menu.
We were testing what happens when users disable features in the admin
panel, so it makes sense to test what happens from the user's point of
view when trying to access a disabled feature: they see a page with the
test "Internal server error".
Whether we should responde with 500 Internal server error page or a 404
Not Found is up to debate; personally I find the latter more
appropriate.
Code based on the article "Changing Rails consider_all_requests_local in
RSpec fails" [1].
[1] http://atodorov.org/blog/2016/04/27/changing-rails-consider_all_requests_local-in-rspec-fails/
We were repeating the same code over and over (with a few variants) to
setup tests which require an administrator. We can use a tag and
simplify the code.
