Transient variables on proxy objects

[dball]

I asked on the mailing list last week:

I recently wrote a couple of factories that could benefit from
arbitrary parameters. A sample:

https://gist.github.com/726192

Note the only difference between the two is the presence of the not
boolean operator in the latter. I'd like to DRY it up by passing in a
parameter to the factory, but the parameter in question doesn't map to
a setter method on the root object, so I can't do something like this:

Factory(:inspection_estimate, :passing => true)

At least, not without monkey patching that setter method in in the
context of the test suite, which doesn't feel right.

Can anyone suggest an alternative way of accomplishing this within
factory_girl?

Joe said:

I think something like this could be cool: https://gist.github.com/726204

If you want to put together a patch that makes it a reality, I'd be
interested.

I put together said patch:

dball@2ac4e0d

It's off of 1.3.x, since that what I use, though I'm happy to work it up against master if you're interested.

Specs are included, though I think I may have glossed over one of the code changes in the attribute subclasses, I'll run through it again tomorrow. Oh, and I just realized, I neglected to provide a spec for the Attribute::List utility class. Still, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the patch.

I don't really like the introduction of the Attribute::List decoration, but I couldn't think of a simpler way to implement the syntax Joe proposed. Alternatives include changing the behavior of Factory.method_missing to return the last attribute added, instead of the whole list, or using a Factory.ignore method to declare the transient attributes. I might also pull the duplicated code in the static and dynamic attributes up into a method on the superclass.

That said, it does the job, so take a look at let me know how you'd like me to proceed.

[jferris]

Hey Donald,

Thanks for the patch! I'll try and take a look at this soon and get back to you.

Thanks,
-Joe

[Holek]

so, what's the status on this issue?

[jferris]

I haven't had time to work on factory_girl in a while. If somebody wants to rebase the patch against master, it would be easier for me to look through.

[joshuaclayton]

I'm going to close this issue since the pull request #142, which will get merged in later today, should support all the functionality requested here. Please feel free to reopen if you don't think that pull req. will handle everything. Thanks!

[joshuaclayton]

Closed by c87429b