Mongoid not playing nicely with factories

Question

Moingoid doesn't seem to be setting embedded relationships persistently during my tests. In my user model I have:

  def vote_on(bill, value)
    if my_groups = self.groups
      my_groups.each do |g|
        bill.votes.create(:value => value, :user_id => self.id, :group_id => g.id)
        # result only with factories: bill.votes.first.group = nil
        # and bill.votes.first.user = nil !!
        # self.id and g.id have good values during the test, they just aren't persisting
      end
    else
      raise "no groups for this user" # #{self.full_name}"
    end
  end

Other helpful code might be:

## bill model
class Bill
   embeds_many :votes

## vote model

class Vote
  include Mongoid::Document
  field :value, :type => Symbol # can be :aye, :nay, :abstain
  #field :group_type, :type => Integer

  belongs_to :user
  belongs_to :group

  embedded_in :bill

end

## test

  test "descriptive tally should work" do
    user1 = Factory.build(:user)
    b = Factory.build(:bill)
    user1.vote_on(b, :aye) # nil values created here!
    tally = b.descriptive_tally
    assert_not_nil tally
  end

## bill factory

Factory.define :bill do |f|
  f.bill_html "just the facts"
  ...
  f.state "Introduced"
  f.text_updated_on DateTime.parse("2011-06-16 00:00:00 Z")
  f.text_word_count 2356
  f.votes
end

## user factory

Factory.define :user do |u|
   u.email      '[e-mail]'
   u.name       'user'
   u.roles_mask 1
   u.password   "secret"
   u.password_confirmation "secret"
   u.groups {[Factory.build(:group, {:name => 'foreign', :type => :custom})]}
end

This is a real head-scratcher for me. Perhaps this is a bug I need to better explore and submit. My first guess is that I am just missing something simple in my factories or test setup. This code works well on development. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I think there are issues with most factory gems and Mongoid. I seem to recall having a lot of issues trying to use both Factory Girl and Machinist.

Fabrication seems to be the current recommended standard for doing object generation in tests with Mongoid. It's worked perfectly for us on all our Mongoid projects.