Feature request #1572: Rails 3: most likely switch to Factory Girl

I like the flexibility of Factory Girl (seems to handle things like associations and sequences and edge cases very well), but I don't like the actual API for generating instances that you use in tests.

For example, compare FixtureReplacement:

it 'should quack like a duck' do
  new_user.quack.should == 'ducky quack'
end

With Factory Girl:

it 'should quack like a duck' do
  Factory.build(:user).quack.should == 'ducky quack'
end

So the FixtureReplacement one pollutes the example namespace with lots of methods like new_user and create_user, but the Factory Girl API just strikes me as ugly and overly verbose. You want instance set-up to be dead easy in testing; that's the whole point of factories.

Machinist seems to strike a nice compromise by adding a single make method to ActiveRecord models (actually, it also adds a plan method but the make method is of principal interest here):

it 'should quack like a duck' do
  User.make.quack.should == 'ducky quack'
end

To flesh that out a bit more, overrides look like this:

User.make(:name => 'bob')

To me this seems like a nice compromise between minimal "pollution" and maximum ease of use and readability.

So I am thinking of using Factory Girl, but adding my own "helper" methods to ActiveRecord models so that I can generate instances the way I like.

Basically, my make method would end up calling Factory.build behind the scenes.