Testing Rails Deep Nested Attributes with RSPEC and FactoryGirl - ruby-on-rails

Question

I need some help getting my factory_girl settings correct on this has one through many with nested attributes. Here's the three models for reference.
location.rb
class Location < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :person_locations
has_many :people, through: :person_locations
end
person_location.rb
class PersonLocation < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :person
belongs_to :location
accepts_nested_attributes_for :location, reject_if: :all_blank
end
person.rb
class Person < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :person_locations
has_many :locations, through: :person_locations
accepts_nested_attributes_for :person_locations, reject_if: :all_blank
end
Notice that locations is nested under the person record, but it needs to go through two models to be nested. I can get the tests working like this:
it "creates the objects and can be called via rails syntax" do
Location.all.count.should == 0
#person = FactoryGirl.create(:person)
#location = FactoryGirl.create(:location)
#person_location = FactoryGirl.create(:person_location, person: #person, location: #location)
#person.locations.count.should == 1
#location.people.count.should == 1
Location.all.count.should == 1
end
I should be able to create all three of these records within one line but haven't figured out how to yet. Here's the structure I would like to have work correctly :
factory :person do
...
trait :location_1 do
person_locations_attributes { location_attributes { FactoryGirl.attributes_for(:location, :location_1) } }
end
end
I have other models which are able to create via a similar syntax, but it has only one nested attribute versus this deeper nesting.
As entered above, I get the following error:
FactoryGirl.create(:person, :location_1)
undefined method `location_attributes' for #<FactoryGirl::SyntaxRunner:0x007fd65102a380>
Furthermore, I want to be able to test properly my controller setup for creating a new user with nested location. It will be tough to do this if I can't get the call down to one line.
Thanks for your help!! Hopefully I provided enough above to help others as well when they are creating a has many through relationship with nested attributes.

Answer 1

A couple of days later I figured it out after reading blog 1 and blog 2. In the process of refactoring all of my FactoryGirl code now.
FactoryGirl should look as follows:
factory :person do
...
trait :location_1 do
after(:create) do |person, evaluator|
create(:person_location, :location_1, person: person)
end
end
end
The person_location factory should be pretty straight forward then following the above code. You can either do the location_attributes which is in the original question or create a similar block to this answer to handle it there.