Fafactory

Fafactory (originally dubbed Far Away Factory) is a tool for remotely creating instances of ActiveRecord models within a service. This is useful when doing integration tests of services, because it allows you to set up the environment within the remote service from your test, rather than trying to keep an instance of the service in pristine shape.

How It Works

Fafactory provides a test mode only controller that can easily create test instances of your ActiveRecord models in your services and a framework for creating those instances from within the tests of the applications that consume those services. So, for example, if you were developing an application that exposed a Widget's resource, you could create a widget using Fafactory and then test loading that widget over ActiveResource.

Installing

Make sure you have gemcutter in your gem sources before you try to do the install. You can find out how to do that at http://gemcutter.org.

gem install fafactory

Now that you've got the gem installed, you'll need to configure any service that you want to expose to Fafactory. Add a line like the following to your environment.rb:

config.gem "fafactory", :lib => "fafactory"

Now, in the app that will be utilizing the Fafactory enabled service, create a file called config/fafactory.yml and define your service in YAML. You'll need to include the filesystem path to the service and the port, so your config file will have one or more entries like the following:

test_app:
  path: ./test_app
  port: 3003

For development with Fafactory, be sure you have the gem "bundler" installed, and then

1. Change into your project directory from an available terminal
2. Run the command "bundle"
3. Happy developement! Don't forget to contribute through GitHub either!

Testing With Fafactory

Assuming you've got a model called Monkey in an app exposing Fafactory, you'll want to define some defaults for your factory first.

Fafactory.define('test_app', :monkey, {:name => "Mongo", :age => 5, :gender => "male" })

Then, you can apply changes to your default and create them within your service.

result = Fafactory.create('test_app', 'Monkey', { "name" => "Alan" })
      
# load the object through active resource, and maybe do something interesting
monkey = Monkey.find(result["id"])
monkey.something_interesting
assert_equal "Mongo", monkey.name

Purging The Remote Database

At the beginning of each test you'll probably want to purge the databases of the services that you're testing interactions with. You can do that with:

Fafactory.purge('test_app')

Finding Records

Sometimes you want to confirm something about a remote object without necessarily calling through ActiveResource, so Fafactory includes a find method that lets you find a particular model in a particular service by its id:

Fafactory.find('test_app', :monkey, 1)

Reporting Issues

If something's not working like you expect it to, submit an issue through the GitHub issues tool for Fafactory, and I'll take a look at your problem. You can find the issues tool here.