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How factory_girl interacts with ActiveRecord
When you invoke a factory, factory_girl uses your definitions to compile a list of attributes that should be assigned to that instance, as well as any associated factories. It saves associations first so that foreign keys will be properly set on dependent models. To create an instance, it calls new without any arguments, assigns each attribute (including associations), and then calls save!. factory_girl doesn’t do anything special to create ActiveRecord instances. It doesn’t interact with the database or extend ActiveRecord or your models in any way.
As an example, take these factory definitions:
FactoryGirl.define do
sequence(:email) {|n| "person-#{n}@example.com" }
factory :user do
email
end
factory :post do
user
title "Hello"
end
end
If you call:
post = create(:post)
That’s roughly equivalent to writing the following:
user = User.new
user.email = "person-1@example.com"
user.save!
post = Post.new
post.title = "Hello"
post.user = user
post.save!
When it has a polymorphic association:
FactoryGirl.define do
sequence(:email) {|n| "person-#{n}@example.com" }
factory :user do
email
end
factory :post do
association :author, factory: :user
title "Hello"
end
end
If you’re having trouble getting factory_girl to build an instance as expected, try building your model from rails console using the same attributes. If you can’t build an instance of your factory, neither can factory_girl. Please make sure to try out your models without using factory_girl before filing a factory_girl bug.