Many-to-Many Uniqueness Constraint Test Not Working - validation

Question

I have a many-to-many relationship with a join table in my Rails application. I'm using the has_many :through idiom in my models. To keep things simple, lets call my first class Student, my second class Course, and the join table class Enrollment (which contains fields student_id and course_id). I want to make sure that a given Student is associated with a given Course at most once (i.e. the {student_id, course_id} tuple should be unique in the enrollment table).
So I have a migration a that enforces this uniqueness.
def change
add_index :enrollments, [:student_id, :course_id], :unique => true
end
In addition my model classes are defined as such:
class Student < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :enrollments
has_many :courses, :through => :enrollment
end
class Course < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :enrollments
has_many :students, :through => :enrollment
end
class Enrollment < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :student
belongs_to :course
validates :student, :presence => true
validates :course, :presence => true
validates :student_id, :uniqueness => {:scope => :course_id}
end
In a rails console, I can do the following:
student = Student.first
course = Course.first
student.courses << course
#... succeeds
student.courses << course
#... appropriately fails and raises an ActiveRecord::RecordInvalid exception
In my RSpec test, I do the exact same thing and I get no exception with the following code:
#student.courses << #course
expect { #student.courses << #course }.to raise_error(ActiveRecord::RecordInvalid)
And so my test fails and reports:
expected ActiveRecord::RecordInvalid but nothing was raised
What's going on here? What could I be doing wrong? How do I fix it?

Answer 1

Rails uses model level validation, if you want strict checking for uniquiness you need to use database level - foreign keys for example. But in this case you need to catch exceptions from database connector.
This is strange because in my code (very similar to your) validation for unique raises exception.

Answer 2

There's a couple of things here that could be happening:
#courses has changed between uses.
#student has changed between uses.
By using let you'll protect these values from changing between expectations.
let(:course) { Course.first }
let(:student) { Student.first }
subject{ student.courses << course << course }
it { should raise_error(ActiveRecord::RecordInvalid) }
Or, there could just be something wrong with your code :)