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 "[email protected]"
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 | [email protected] |
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.
Comments
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.
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.
That really good to know. Thanks for this great tip!
Thank you, I found this useful
Thanks for sharing
thanks
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!
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!
Is there a way to do this without tables?
Alas, it appears these are to be removed in 4.0.
http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/25650434584/writing-better-cucumber-scenarios-or-why-were
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. =/
Good point. Time for us to update the post!
The above steps really seemed to be ,helpful from the point of implementing Factory girl in Cucumber.
It looks like they moved this somewhere, or got rid off it. I’m having trouble finding it now.