Practical Cucumber: Factory Girl steps
This post is part of our Practical Cucumber series.
Did you know that factory_girl comes with some really useful cucumber steps? You’re not alone, even though they’ve been around for a while.
Simply require them in your cucumber env.rb file:
require "factory_girl/step_definitions"
Then you can begin using them in your features:
Given a user exists with an email of "brandon@example.com" And the following categories exist: | Name | | Cucumber | | BDD | And the following article exists: | Title | Body | Published at | | Factory Girl cucumber steps | lorem… | 2010-09-10 |
One of my favorite features of the factory_girl steps is that you can also specify associations:
Given the following user exists: | Name | Email | | Brandon | brandon@example.com | And the following articles exist: | Title | Author | | Article 1 | Name: Brandon | | Article 2 | Name: Daniel |
To make this to work, declare your associations in the factory and the steps will try to find or create by the association attribute.
Factory.define :article do |m|
m.sequence(:title) {|i| "Article #{i}" }
m.association :author, :factory => :user
end
Stop wasting time writing basic steps for creating models and spend your time working on the application.
This post is part of our Practical Cucumber series.
13 Comments
Jeremy D. Frens September 09, 2010 http://www.norecess.org/
In the words of Johnny Carson (through the voice of Dana Carvey), “I… I did not know that.” But I’m very happy I do now; that’s awesome.
Torey Heinz September 09, 2010 http://ihswebdesign.com
I have been using Machinist lately and didn’t find any cucumber steps like these, so right away I hacked together some Machinist steps. http://ihswebdesign.com/blog/machinist-steps/
Might be helpful to someone.
DAvid September 27, 2010
That really good to know. Thanks for this great tip!
Manu October 29, 2010 http://manuraghavan.net
Thank you, I found this useful
Manu October 29, 2010 http://manuraghavan.net
Thank you, I found this useful
neohomerico December 14, 2010
Thanks for sharing
John February 26, 2011
thanks
Dorian May 18, 2011
That’s very interesting indeed. However i get the following error
Undefined step: “the following user exists:” (Cucumber::Undefined exception)
(i’ve installed all the required gems and updated the cucumbre env.rb file)
Any hints on how to fix that? Thanks!
Daniel Morrison May 18, 2011 http://collectiveidea.com
Dorian, I know exactly what it is because I got stuck here a couple months ago, even though I’ve done this tons of times.
Make sure you have a user factory defined. It isn’t enough to just have the model, you have to have the factory defined too.
Hope that solves it!
Al March 21, 2012
Is there a way to do this without tables?
Matthew Hassfurder July 02, 2012 http://matthew.hassfurder.com
Alas, it appears these are to be removed in 4.0.
http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/25650434584/writing-better-cucumber-scenarios-or-why-were
Andrew August 31, 2012 http://www.andrewhavens.com
Ah, yes, these factory_girl steps have been removed. I wondered why I couldn’t get it to work. I should also remember check the date of when articles are written. =/
Daniel Morrison August 31, 2012 http://collectiveidea.com
Good point. Time for us to update the post!
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