Factory Girl and has_many / has_many :through associations
If you want to create has_many and has_many through associations in factory_girl as I once did, you will need to put it inside square brackets:
Factory.define :user do |user|
user.name "My Name"
user.groups {|groups| [groups.association(:group)]}
end
This will ensure that user.groups is not overriden by a single Group object, but by an array with a Group inside.
If it wasn’t for excellent people like you – who find an answer to an annoying problem like this and then publish it to the world – people like me would spend hours hitting our heads against a brick wall. I salute you!
Just started using Factory Girl and it looks really useful but, unless I’m being thick, I couldn’t find this in the rdoc.
I’m sure you couldn’t, and that’s not your fault. It’s not there. I found it on a blog, but since I posted a few days after reading it, I could not remember the source, for what I am sorry.
I try your suggestion but…
All groups end up with “user_id = nil”
Using factory_girl 1.2.0
can you tell us how your relationships are defined in the models so we can help you better?
I simply tried the suggestion making
class User
has_many :posts
class Post
belongs_to :user
In the code above all groups end up with “user_id = nil”. Actually the factory creates the posts and the users. And the result is many unrelated posts and users.
Can we consider it a bug or missing feature of factory girl?
The one to many definition does not work:
user.groups {|groups| [groups.association(:group)]}
Nice tip. I respect you.
You are trying to write complicated factories? Maybe you need to add
helper methods to your factories to keep it clean. Here is how:
http://conceptspace.wikidot.com/blog:39
This allows you to define complicated belongs_to and has_many
scenarios neatly. For example:
Factory.define :child do |f|
class << f
#do whatever you can do in a normal class definition
def default_parent
@default_parent ||= Factory(:parent)
end
end
f.sequence(:name) {|n| "Child#{n}"}
f.parent_id { f.default_parent.id }
end
thanks, that really helps a lot
Thanks! This issue cost me about an hour today. The docs still only have the rarer has_one/belongs_to examples.
[...] Dante Regis has written about this before but I found it sufficiently sufficiently frustrating that I thought I’d document it as well. [...]
Mark Needham: FactoryGirl: ‘has_and_belongs_to_many’ associations and the ‘NoMethodError’ | Software Secret Weapons said this on September 28, 2010 at 4:30 am |
Whoa! This issue still exists since I couldn’t get things working before I read your tip.
Thanks!
Ditto that, burnt a day on this. Finally a solution.
In your original post your wrote that you “once” used factory girl for has_many. What do you use now?
If you then wanted to build a user associated with a specific group in your test suite, do this:
build(:user, :groups => [ build(:group, :group_name => 'Rails Developers') ])
‘group_name’ and ‘Rails Developers’ are just arbitrarily chosen. But hope the correct syntax helps.
[...] only source of help I found for this can be found at Factory Girl and has_many / has_many :through associations by Dante [...]
Factory Girl and has_many :through said this on January 15, 2012 at 10:54 pm |