Find or create record through factory_girl associa

Question

I have a User model that belongs to a Group. Group must have unique name attribute. User factory and group factory are defined as:

Factory.define :user do |f|
  f.association :group, :factory => :group
  # ...
end

Factory.define :group do |f|
  f.name "default"
end

When the first user is created a new group is created too. When I try to create a second user it fails because it wants to create same group again.

Is there a way to tell factory_girl association method to look first for an existing record?

Note: I did try to define a method to handle this, but then I cannot use f.association. I would like to be able to use it in Cucumber scenarios like this:

Given the following user exists:
  | Email          | Group         |
  | [e-mail] | Name: mygroup |

and this can only work if association is used in Factory definition.

Answer 1

I ended up using a mix of methods found around the net, one of them being inherited factories as suggested by duckyfuzz in another answer.

I did following:

# in groups.rb factory

def get_group_named(name)
  # get existing group or create new one
  Group.where(:name => name).first || Factory(:group, :name => name)
end

Factory.define :group do |f|
  f.name "default"
end

# in users.rb factory

Factory.define :user_in_whatever do |f|
  f.group { |user| get_group_named("whatever") }
end

Answer 2

I'm using exactly the Cucumber scenario you described in your question:

Given the following user exists:
  | Email          | Group         |
  | [e-mail] | Name: mygroup |

You can extend it like:

Given the following user exists:
  | Email          | Group         |
  | [e-mail] | Name: mygroup |
  | [e-mail]  | Name: mygroup |
  | [e-mail]  | Name: mygroup |

This will create 3 users with the group "mygroup". As it used like this uses 'find_or_create_by' functionality, the first call creates the group, the next two calls finds the already created group.

Answer 3

You can also use a FactoryGirl strategy to achieve this

module FactoryGirl
  module Strategy
    class Find
      def association(runner)
        runner.run
      end

      def result(evaluation)
        build_class(evaluation).where(get_overrides(evaluation)).first
      end

      private

      def build_class(evaluation)
        evaluation.instance_variable_get(:@attribute_assigner).instance_variable_get(:@build_class)
      end

      def get_overrides(evaluation = nil)
        return @overrides unless @overrides.nil?
        evaluation.instance_variable_get(:@attribute_assigner).instance_variable_get(:@evaluator).instance_variable_get(:@overrides).clone
      end
    end

    class FindOrCreate
      def initialize
        @strategy = FactoryGirl.strategy_by_name(:find).new
      end

      delegate :association, to: :@strategy

      def result(evaluation)
        found_object = @strategy.result(evaluation)

        if found_object.nil?
          @strategy = FactoryGirl.strategy_by_name(:create).new
          @strategy.result(evaluation)
        else
          found_object
        end
      end
    end
  end

  register_strategy(:find, Strategy::Find)
  register_strategy(:find_or_create, Strategy::FindOrCreate)
end

You can use this gist. And then do the following

FactoryGirl.define do
  factory :group do
    name "name"
  end

  factory :user do
    association :group, factory: :group, strategy: :find_or_create, name: "name"
  end
end

This is working for me, though.

Answer 4

You can to use initialize_with with find_or_create method

FactoryGirl.define do
  factory :group do
    name "name"
    initialize_with { Group.find_or_create_by_name(name)}
  end

  factory :user do
    association :group
  end
end

It can also be used with id

FactoryGirl.define do
  factory :group do
    id     1
    attr_1 "default"
    attr_2 "default"
    ...
    attr_n "default"
    initialize_with { Group.find_or_create_by_id(id)}
  end

  factory :user do
    association :group
  end
end

For Rails 4

The correct way in Rails 4 is Group.find_or_create_by(name: name), so you'd use

initialize_with { Group.find_or_create_by(name: name) } 

instead.

Answer 5

Usually I just make multiple factory definitions. One for a user with a group and one for a groupless user:

Factory.define :user do |u|
  u.email "email"
  # other attributes
end

Factory.define :grouped_user, :parent => :user do |u|
  u.association :group
  # this will inherit the attributes of :user
end

THen you can use these in your step definitions to create users and groups seperatly and join them together at will. For example you could create one grouped user and one lone user and join the lone user to the grouped users team.

Anyway, you should take a look at the pickle gem which will allow you to write steps like:

Given a user exists with email: "[e-mail]"
And a group exists with name: "default"
And the user: "[e-mail]" has joined that group
When somethings happens....