Setup Factory Girl with Test::Unit and Shoulda - ruby-on-rails

Question

I'm trying to set up Factory Girl with Test::Unit and Shoulda in Ruby on Rails. I have installed the gem, created my factory file under the test/factories directory, and created my spec file under the test/models directory. The current error I'm getting is 'ArgumentError: No such factory: test', which leads me to believe that the test_factory.rb file is not being loaded? Any idea as to what I should change?
Here are my files.
#test/factories/test_factory.rb
Factory.define :test do |t|
t.name 'test_spotlight'
t.label 'test spotlight label'
end
and
#test/modes/test_spec.rb
require 'test_helper'
require 'factory_girl'
class TestTest < Test::Unit::TestCase
def setup
#test = Factory.build(:test)
end
context "A test" do
should "save with the minimum requirements" do
assert #test.save
end
end
end

Answer 1

I've run into this problem on one of my projects too. I'm not sure precisely what's causing the initialization code to be skipped but you can force load the factory definitions like this:
require 'factory_girl'
Factory.find_definitions
Hope this helps.

Answer 2

Try putting this in test_helper.rb:
require 'factory_girl'
Dir.glob(File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/factories/*").each do |factory|
require factory
end

Answer 3

Just discovered factory_girl_rails, where it says the autoloading is the only extra thing it has https://github.com/thoughtbot/factory_girl_rails

Answer 4

I had the same problem. Eventually I made do by putting all my factories in "/test/factories.rb" and writing the following lines in my "/test/test_helper.rb" file:
require 'factory_girl'
require File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/factories"
you could do the same thing for multiple files by requiring them in the test_helper. I haven't yet figured out why the auto-include that's mentioned in "factory_girl's" readme doesn't happen.

Answer 5

I also managed to get rid of this issue by putting this line into my environment.rb:
config.gem "factory_girl", :source => "http://gemcutter.org"
Make also sure you have the latest gem:
Name changed from "thoughtbot-factory_girl" to "factory_girl", source changed from "http://gems.github.com" to "http://gemcutter.org".

Answer 6

In case you had this issue with ruby 1.9.2, require expects the expanded path.
File.expand_path("test/factories.rb")
This patch solved my problem. I just sent a pull request.
After that you can add this to your test_helper.rb:
require 'factory_girl'
FactoryGirl.find_definitions

Answer 7

If I only required 'factory_girl' in test_helper.rb, I would get the same behavior you mentioned, yet if I required it in my config/test/environment.rb (note I use environmentalist) it would properly find the Factory definition without any issue.
I tried this after reading the factory girl rdoc where it says to put config.gem in your environment.

Answer 8

I also ran into the problem - after updating FactoryGirl to 1.3.2 - that factories from test/factories were not loaded automatically any more.
I could get rid of the problem by adding the code from dg into test_helper.rb:
Dir.glob(File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/factories/*.rb").each do |factory|
require factory
end
When running single tests in Textmate, everything worked fine, but running e.g. all unit tests from the command line using rake test:units failed with a DuplicateDefinitionError (I read that it has probably something to do with ruby 1.8.x). So I slightly changed the code:
if (!Factory.factories || Factory.factories.empty?)
Dir.glob(File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/factories/*.rb").each do |factory|
require factory
end
end

Answer 9

Have you tried moving the
require 'factory_girl'
to your test/test_helper.rb ?
The factory auto-loading mechanism may depend on where the the require is called. It could be trying to find factories *test/models/factories/** instead of *test/factories/**

Answer 10

Instead of naming your factory file test_factory.rb, try naming it factory.rb

Answer 11

Interesting. I had a similar problem trying to get cucumber to work with factory_girl. I had originally configured factory_girl to be looked for ('config.gem') but not loaded in the cucumber environment and fully required in 'features/support/env.rb', same as cucumber does for webrat, etc. That only started to work when I explicitly told factory_girl to find its definitions as Kenny suggested above.
When I removed the require statement from env.rb and fully required factory_girl in the cucumber environment, the effect went away and factory_girl worked out of the box.
So it really seems to be a question of when (or in which context) factory_girl gets loaded.

Answer 12

Since different people are using different versions of Rails (2.x and 3.x being the most common now), it is important to include the other pertinent pieces of your environment (the most important being which version of Rails you're on). From the factory_girl web page, version 1.3.0 documentation (http://rubydoc.info/gems/factory_girl/1.3.0/frames):
If you want to use factory_girl with Rails 3, use the
factory_girl_rails gem, not this one.
If you want to use factory_girl with Rails versions prior to Rails 3,
use version 1.2.4.
If you're having trouble with the loading, I'd suggest making sure that you are using the right version. The versions of factory_girl greater than 1.2.4, I'd assume, are brought in as dependencies for the 'factory_girl_rails' (Rails 3.0+) gem.

Answer 13

I added
require 'factory_girl'
require File.dirname(FILE) + "/factories"
to spec_helper.rb whiche helped, but then I rememberd Spork can sometimes ba a bit of a problem, so I restarted Spork without the require and then it worked fine.