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Protip: Use Your Factories in Development

Clinton R. Nixon
Clinton R. Nixon, Senior Developer, August 17, 2008 2

I’ve been training a new Rails developer recently, and I’ve found it rewarding. His questions are great: without already-built habits, he thinks of ways to do things I never would.

Last week, he said, “I need to test this view with some real data to make sure it looks OK. We have all these factory methods to use in our unit tests. Can we use those in development?” I almost said no, but then I realized it was a pretty great idea.

We’re using FixtureReplacement on this project, but this technique will work with any factories. We opened script/console and typed the following:

require 'fixture_replacement'
include FixtureReplacement
require RAILS_ROOT + '/db/example_data'

With that, I could use, for example, our create_completed_order method to make a purchased cart with multiple items in it so we could see how the admin interface was looking. It’s no replacement for good testing, but for quick view checks, it’s a pretty cool trick.

Posted in Ruby on Rails and Tips and Tricks on 08/17/08 2 comments
Lar Van Der Jagt said on 09/04 at 02:21 PM

I have used several different strategies for achieving this, and have settled on the plugin seed_fu to accomplish this task. Because it uses plain ruby files you have quite a few more options for manipulating your seed data as opposed to using fixtures. I have found that this lets me create seed data that is much less brittle than fixtures can be. You can find seed_fu on github:

http://github.com/mbleigh/seed-fu/tree

David Eisinger said on 10/20 at 10:44 AM

I’ve been using this tip with factory_girl. It’s as simple as opening a console and running

require RAILS_ROOT + ‘/test/factory’

or whatever your factory file is named.

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