Ok, so I've ran into a very strange issue, directly connected with before blocks. I'm doing a integration testing via Watir and RSpec. For a simple test to check if user can perform a login I'm creating a 'user' record in the db by means of factory_girl.

So I put the following code:

before(:each) do
  @user = Factory(:user)
end

if "should perform a login" do
  # do stuff
end

In do stuff I call a browser and see how the user tries to login. Unfortunately, somehow he cannot do that — "Username isn't valid".

After some investigation I discovered that if I put the code for creating user in before(:all) block, everything magically works. How's that? What's the difference between :all and :each in this context? Also, If I put the code for creating user actually in the test body, it still doesn't work (i.e. user somehow isn't added to the DB or something).