Associations with Factory Girl in Controller specs - ruby-on-rails

Question

I'm new to RSpec, and trying to get my head around using Factory Girl with associations in controller specs. The difficulty is:
it's necessary to use "attributes_for" in functional tests
attributes_for "elides any associations"
So if I have models like this:
class Brand < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :org
validates :org, :presence => true
end
class Org < ActiveRecord::Base
has_many :brands
end
And a factory like this:
FactoryGirl.define do
factory :brand do
association :org
end
end
This controller spec fails:
describe BrandsController do
describe "POST create with valid params" do
it "creates a new brand" do
expect {
post :create, brand: attributes_for(:brand)
}.to change(Brand, :count).by(1)
end
end
end
(And if I comment out "validates :org, :presence => true" it passes)
There are a number of solutions suggested and I think I have been making simple errors which have meant that I have not been able to get any of them to work.
1) Changing the factory to org_id per a suggestion on this page failed a number of tests with "Validation failed: Org can't be blank"
FactoryGirl.define do
factory :brand do
org_id 1002
end
end
2) Using "symbolize_keys" looks promising. Here and here it is suggested to use code like this:
(FactoryGirl.build :position).attributes.symbolize_keys
I'm not sure how to apply this in my case. Below is a guess that doesn't work (giving the error No route matches {:controller=>"brands", :action=>"{:id=>nil, :name=>\"MyString\", :org_id=>1052, :include_in_menu=>false, :created_at=>nil, :updated_at=>nil}"}):
describe BrandsController do
describe "POST create with valid params" do
it "creates a new brand" do
expect {
post build(:brand).attributes.symbolize_keys
}.to change(Brand, :count).by(1)
end
end
end
Update
I almost got this working with Shioyama's answer below but got the error message:
Failure/Error: post :create, brand: build(:brand).attributes.symbolize_keys
ActiveModel::MassAssignmentSecurity::Error:
Can't mass-assign protected attributes: id, created_at, updated_at
So following this question I changed it to:
post :create, brand: build(:brand).attributes.symbolize_keys.reject { |key, value| !Brand.attr_accessible[:default].collect { |attribute| attribute.to_sym }.include?(key) }
Which worked!

Answer 1

In your solution 2), you have not passed an action to post which is why it is throwing an error.
Try replacing the code in that expect block to:
post :create, brand: build(:brand).attributes.symbolize_keys