Comments on: db fixtures replacement solution step by step

By: Nicolas Mérouze

Nicolas Mérouze — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 16:06:00 +0000

Why not to use merb-fixtures with merb? It looks like it’s pretty much the same. (because factory_girl is one library which can be used everywhere ?)

By: Matt Aimonetti

Matt Aimonetti — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 16:06:00 +0000

@nicolas good question! So you have 2 alternatives quite popular in the Merb world:

[merb-fixtures](http://github.com/botanicus/merb-fixtures/tree/master) and [dm-sweatshop](http://github.com/sam/dm-more/tree/master/dm-sweatshop/README.textile) while both options are pretty good they are not framework/ORM agnostic.

Also merb-fixtures doesn’t auto save fixtures like when you do Factory(:client) instead of Factory.build(:client) and the declaration of associations is dodgy IMHO. (plus it has a limited API, no support for seques etc…)

dm-sweatshop is better than merb-fixtures but only works with DM at the moment. (it used to be ORM agnostic) It has a great API and offers most of the sexiness from factory_girl.

By: Bryan Ray

Bryan Ray — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 16:06:00 +0000

Thanks for the write up, Matt.

I typically used the object_daddy plugin in Rails and wasn’t sure anything like this was out there for Merb.

I’ll be playing with factory_girl and dm-sweatshop this weekend.

By: grosser

grosser — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 16:06:00 +0000

a great deal of these tests can be simplified to something like

assert_invalid_attributes User, :login=>['',nil,'admin'], :email=>['',nil,'aa'] etc

http://pragmatig.wordpress.com/2008/04/04/testing-validation-the-dry-way/

especially the == "less than xx and more than yy" test semm very brittle to me, add one character and boom.. not very maintainable