Usage with Rails, RSpec and Cucumber

This is how we have things set up for our Rails projects (with RSpec and Cucumber goodness).

Currently (as of version 0.1.3) there is a bug when ObjectFactory is used as a gem – so we install it as a plugin (cd vendor/plugins && gem unpack brightbox-object-factory does the trick). However, I promise I will get this fixed very soon.

Preparation

We add a setup file to the lib folder: lib/prepare_object_factory.rb.

This contains a function that prepares the ObjectFactory for use:

def prepare_object_factory
  when_creating_a Company, 
    :auto_generate => [:name, :address, :city, :postcode, :telephone]

  when_creating_a Person, 
    :auto_generate => [:first_name, :last_name], 
    :auto_confirm => :password, 
    :generate_email_address => :email, 
    :set => { :age => 22 }, 
    :generate => { :company => lambda { a_saved Company } }
end

Note the use of :generate and lambda to ensure that people are linked to a (dynamically created) Company (unless you explicitly override it at creation-time).

RSpec

We then add the following to our spec/spec_helper.rb

require 'object_factory'
require 'lib/prepare_object_factory'

Spec::Runner.configure do |config|
  # various bits of config
  config.before :all do 
    prepare_object_factory
  end
end

This makes sure that the factory is prepared before running the specs.

You can then use it in your specs as follows:

describe Person do
  it "should have a first name" do
    @person = a Person, :first_name => ''
    @person.should_not be_valid
    @person.should have(1).errors_on(:first_name)
  end
  it "should belong to a company" do
    @person = a Person, :company => nil
    @person.should_not be_valid
    @person.should have(1).errors_on(:company)
  end
  # und so weiter
end

Cucumber

We add the following to features/support/env.rb:

require 'object_factory'
require 'lib/prepare_object_factory'

prepare_object_factory

And we use it in our steps as follows:

Given /^someone called (.*)$/ do | first_name | 
  person = a_saved Person, :first_name => first_name
end

Pretty simple huh?