For the longest time, I didn’t understand the full power of the various #find methods in Rails. I probably still don’t, but my understanding of them has certainly expanded. I used to use plain #find for everything. If I wanted to find all rows in the table ‘groups’ that had an ‘id’ field value of 1, 2, 3, or 4, I would do something like this:

Group.find(
  :all,
  :conditions => ["id=? OR id=? OR id=? OR ID=?", 1, 2, 3, 4]
)

I wanted a #login method in test_helper that would allow me to easily login from any of my functional tests. However, the #post method won’t allow you to set a different controller than the one in the @controller instance variable that’s defined in your test’s #setup. Well, by looking at how the #process method works, you can see that it just grabs the controller from @controller. Redefine that, and you’re good to go: