Rails 4 Test Prescriptions

Factories

Generically, the factory pattern refers to a class or module in your application whose sole purpose is to safely and correctly create other objects in your application. Outside of tests, factories are frequently used to encapsulate complex object-creation logic. Inside of Rails tests, factories are used to provide templates for creating valid objects.

Rather than specifying all the test data exactly, the factory tool provides a blueprint for creating a sample instance of your model. When you need data for a specific test, you call a factory method, which gives you an object based on your blueprint. You can override the blueprint to identify any specific attribute values required to make your test work out. Calling the factory method ...