I have a Rails application with a small SOAP service that is used for integration. Today I updated the site to Edge Rails and noticed a ton of strange errors related to ActionWebService. The first error looked like this:

Expected app/controllers/my_controller.rb to define MyController 

I remembered hearing that ActionWebService was going to be moved out of Rails core, and I eventually found changeset 6550 from about 1 month ago where AWS was removed from the default load path. The ChangeLog suggests adding vendor/rails/actionwebservice/lib to config.load_paths. It turns out this is not enough. The app/apis directory also needs to be added to the load path and ‘action_web_service’ needs to be required.

Here is an excerpt from my environment.rb after making these changes:

Rails::Initializer.run do |config|
  # Add additional load paths for your own custom dirs
  config.load_paths += %W(
    #{RAILS_ROOT}/app/apis
    #{RAILS_ROOT}/vendor/rails/actionwebservice/lib
  )

  # ...more stuff...
end

require 'action_web_service'

This will get AWS working again, but functional tests may fail with the following error:

NoMethodError: undefined method 'invoke' for #<MyApiTest:0x3180f08>

There is one more change that is necessary: add require 'action_web_service/test_invoke' to the top of test/test_helper.rb.

ENV["RAILS_ENV"] = "test"
require File.expand_path(File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/../config/environment")
require 'test_help'
require 'action_web_service/test_invoke'

Tags: actionwebservice, edge, rails, soap