code tunes

Factory Girl is my fixture replacement library of choice. It improves tests readability and maintainability. It’s also customizable.

There are sometimes situations when you want to create test scenarios that checks how your app is handling invalid data (not user input, but invalid records that already sit in your database). To do this you first need to put this invalid data to your db.

You could accomplish this with such line:

@user = Factory(:user, :email => "not a correct email address")

However, factory girl would raise an exception here, because that’s the default strategy of creating new fixtures - raise exception if save fails (because of validation errors for example).

Thankfully we can use our own strategy of creating new fixtures, such that does save records without validation.

First let’s define our new strategy:

class Factory::Proxy::CreateWithoutValidation < Factory::Proxy::Build
  def result
    @instance.save(false)
    @instance
  end
end
 
class Factory
  def self.create_without_validation (name, overrides = {})
    factory_by_name(name).run(Proxy::CreateWithoutValidation, overrides)
  end
end

Now we can use it while defining new factory:

Factory.define :invalid_user, :class => User, :default_strategy => :create_without_validation do |f|
  ...
end

And then we can happily create invalid fixtures without any exceptions raised.

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