Factory girl, dependent factories - ruby-on-rails-3

Question

UPDATE
I went back to using Fixtures. IMOP, fixtures are FAR better than factories; easier to use, easier to write, easier to understand (no magic). My suggestion: limit your testing library to the very basics (listen to DHH)...use minitest with fixtures.
original post
In my app a district has many schools, a school has many uses, a user has many accounts, an account has one role. In order to create complete factories for testing I need to create a user and school that persists across factories. Im getting a "stack level too deep" error in my recent attempts.
My user_test.rb
FactoryGirl.define do
factory :district do
name "Seattle"
end
factory :school do
association :primarycontact, factory: :user # expecting this to attach the user_id from factory :user as :primary contact_id in the school model
association :district, factory: :district # expecting this to attach the :district_id from the :district factory as :district_id in the school model
name "Test School"
end
factory :user do, aliases: [:primarycontact]
email "adam#example.com"
name "Who What"
username "wwhat"
password "123456"
password_confirmation { |u| u.password }
association :school, factory: :school # expecting this to create :school_id in the users model, using the :school factory
end
factory :role do
name "student"
end
factory :account do
association :user, factory: :user
association :role, factory: :role
end
end
So, I am attempting to do FactoryGirl.create(:account)... which I am expecting to create an account, with the user and role from the factories above, with the user associated with the school that is associated with the district. This is not working for me. Among failing tests I get a "stack level too deep" error. And, I believe my before each DatabaseCleaner.clean is clearing the test db before each new factory.
The test that calls these factories is:
describe "User integration" do
def log_em_in
visit login_path
fill_in('Username', :with => "wwhat")
fill_in('Password', :with => "123456")
click_button('Log In')
end
it "tests log in" do
user = FactoryGirl.create(:account)
log_em_in
current_path.should == new_user_path
end
end
.
current_path.should == new_user_path returns unknown method error 'should'
How can I improve this code to nest the factories correctly and get a current_user in order to continue testing?
MODELS
school.rb
belongs_to :district
belongs_to :primarycontact, :class_name => "User"
has_many :users, :dependent => :destroy
user.rb
belongs_to :school
has_many :accounts, :dependent => :destroy
district.rb
has_many :schools
account.rb
belongs_to :role
belongs_to :user
role.rb
has_many :accounts
has_many :users, :through => :accounts

Answer 1

Your basic problem is that you have a circular dependency between your user factory and your school factory, caused by the fact that you create a primarycontact (a user) when you create a school, then that user creates a school, and so on.
You can get around this by changing how you define your school association inside the user factory. Before doing that though, I'd suggest as a general rule using the shorthand notation for associations. So replace this:
factory :account do
association :user, factory: :user
association :role, factory: :role
end
with this:
factory :account do
user
role
end
Using this simplification, the following factories will do what you want without generating any circular dependency:
FactoryGirl.define do
factory :district do
name "Seattle"
end
factory :school do |school|
district
primarycontact
name "Test School"
after_build do |s|
s.primarycontact.school = s
end
end
factory :user do
email "adam#example.com"
name "Who What"
username "wwhat"
password "123456"
password_confirmation { |u| u.password }
school
end
factory :primarycontact, class: "User" do
# add any attributes you want the primarycontact user to have here
end
factory :role do
name "student"
end
factory :account do
user
role
end
end
Notice that what I have done is to create a factory for primarycontact with the class: "User" option. Unlike the user factory, this factory does not create the school by default, avoiding the circular dependency.
Then in the school factory, I use an after_build callback to assign the school itself to the school association on primarycontact, rather than creating a new school (which was causing the problem in your factories).
Hope that makes sense. Note that the callback syntax has changed in the more recent version of factory_girl, see the documentation for details.