CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2012/ch2a 2w33 pv

SaaS - 5.5 - Fixtures and Factories

Fixtures

Fixtures are sample data on which all the tests run.

There can be 3 types of fixtures<ref>http://ar.rubyonrails.org/classes/Fixtures.html</ref>:

1. YAML fixtures
2. CSV fixtures
3. Single-file fixtures

YAML Fixtures

YAML is a recursive acronym for "YAML Ain't Markup Language".<ref>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YAML</ref> YAML is a file format which describes data structures in a non-verbose, human-readable format. This file ends with the .yml extension.

The following example shows the format of a YAML fixture:

post_one:
  title: one
  description: post_one_desc
  category: category_one
  user: user_one

post_two:
  title: two
  description: post_two_desc
  category: category_two
  user: user_two

CSV fixtures

Comma Separated Value format can be used to store sample data. The files end with ".csv" extension. The first line of the CSV file is a comma-separated list of field names. The rest of the file contains the actual data. CSV fixtures have no fixture names.

The following example shows the format of a CSV fixture:

title,description, category, user
one, post_one_desc, category_one, user_one 
two, post_two_desc, category_two, user_two

Single-file fixtures

Fixtures for this format are created by placing text files in a sub-directory (with the name of the model) to the directory appointed by ActiveSupport::TestCase.fixture_path=(path). Each text file placed in this directory represents a "record". Usually these types of fixtures are named without extensions.

The following example shows the format of a single-file fixture:

posts/post_one
posts/post_two

Fixtures are basically Hash objects<ref>http://guides.rubyonrails.org/testing.html#the-low-down-on-fixtures</ref>. We can access the hash object directly because it is automatically setup as a local variable of the test case. For example:

# this will return the Hash for the fixture named post_one
posts(:post_one)

Factories

A factory is an object used to create other objects. Factory objects are used in test-driven development to allow the classes to be put under test.

References

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