Cucumber Factory - create ActiveRecord objects without step definitions

Cucumber Factory allows you to create ActiveRecord objects directly from your Cucumber features. No step definitions required.

Examples

The following will call Movie.make, Factory.create(:movie), Movie.create! or Movie.new, depending on what’s available:

Given there is a movie

To create a new record with attributes set, you can say:

Given there is a movie with the title "Sunshine" and the year "2007"

The following will also store the created record in @sunshine:

Given "Sunshine" is a movie with the title "Sunshine" and the year "2007"

To set associations you can refer to other records by name:

Given "Before Sunrise" is a movie
And "Before Sunset" is a movie with the prequel "Before Sunrise"

You can also refer to the last created object of a kind by saying “above”:

Given there is a movie with the title "Before Sunrise"
And "Before Sunset" is a movie with the prequel above

Boolean attributes can be set by appending “which”, “that” or “who” at the end:

Given there is a movie which is awesome
And there is a movie with the name "Sunshine" that is not a comedy
And there is a director who is popular

Instead of “and” you can also use “but” and commas to join sentences:

Given there is a movie which is awesome, popular and successful but not science fiction
And there is a director with the income "500000" but with the account balance "-30000"

Factory support

Machinist blueprints and factory_girl factories will be used when available.

You can use named Machinist blueprint such as Movie.blueprint(:comedy) like this:

Given a movie (comedy) with the title "Groundhog Day"

Overriding factory steps

If you want to override a factory step with your own version, just do so:

Given /^there is a movie with good actors$/ do
  movie = Movie.make
  movie.actors << Actor.make(:name => 'Clive Owen')
  movie.actors << Actor.make(:name => 'Denzel Washington')
end

Custom steps will always be preferred over factory steps. Also Cucumber will not raise a warning about ambiguous steps if the only other matching step is a factory step.

Installation and setup

Cucumber Factory is a gem, which you can install with

sudo gem install cucumber_factory

In Rails 2, add the following to your environment.rb:

config.gem 'cucumber_factory'

In Rails 3, add the following to your Gemfile:

gem 'cucumber_factory'

Finally, create a file features/step_definitions/factory_steps.rb, which just says

Cucumber::Factory.add_steps(self)

Rails 3 compatibility

We cannot guarantee Rails 3 compatibility at this point, but we will upgrade the gem when Rails 3 is released.

Credits

Henning Koch

makandra.com

gem-session.com