A stab at "fixing" fixtures

John_Barnette · October 23, 2007, 5:02am

All,

I've recently extracted a plugin that significantly improves (well, I hope) fixtures. I'd originally written it as a backwards-compatible patch, but I'd like to get some comments on the approach before I shove it into Trac.

I tossed it out on #rails-contrib, and bitsweat thought it might benefit from a larger audience. Major benefits include constant generated ID's, specification of belongs_to/has_one associations by label, and the total obliteration of HABTM join table fixtures. Kindly pile on the comments.

Plugin and a pretty extensive README at http://svn.geeksomnia.com/rathole/trunk.

~ j.

Courtenay · October 23, 2007, 5:41am

"Fixture bashing is a popular hobby, and I'm especially indebted to Courtenay/caboo.se's Awesome Fixtures, which originally talked me down off of the "no more fixtures, ever!" ledge."

Aww, shucks..

Courtenay · October 23, 2007, 5:45am

The syntax is great! But this defaults thing is difficult to remember

DEFAULTS: &DEFAULTS created_on: <%= 3.weeks.ago.to_s(:db) %>

first: name: Smurf <<: *DEFAULTS

John_Barnette · October 23, 2007, 5:49am

Absolutely, and it would be really easy to support a DEFAULTS key internally instead of letting YAML do it. I originally avoided supporting the defaults internally to keep the code from bloating, but that might be a lame reason.

~ j.

James_Cox1 · October 23, 2007, 8:20am

John,

I still think the syntax is a little wet… When you’re just specifying lists of things (like, apples, oranges and grapes):

apple:

orange:

grape:

It’d be cool if you could collapse all that:

fruits: grape, orange, apple

(this being fruits.yml)

alternatively - in DEFAULTS, you could have keys that have a ‘collapse’ value… and that collapses to the block key…

OK, that probably makes no sense at all, but if it does, it’d be awesome if it had that support…

james

Courtenay · October 23, 2007, 8:49am

John,

I still think the syntax is a little wet... When you're just specifying lists of things (like, apples, oranges and grapes):

apple:   name: apple

orange:   name: orange

grape:   name: grape

It'd be cool if you could collapse all that:

fruits: grape, orange, apple

erm, IMO this is a case for some programattic record creation in your actual test helper.

%w( apple orange banana ).each { |fruit| Fruit.create(:name => fruit) }

my fixtures tend to be named after their function, so

invalid_name: name: Joe'"; DROP TABLE users id: 4 address: 1 Main St, .. email: joe@foo.bar

missing_email: name: Joe id: 5

etc.

Courtenay

James_Cox1 · October 23, 2007, 9:06am

fixtures which are named after their function aren't a bad idea, however, I tend to do this within my tests:

it "Should have a valid name" do Fruit.create(valid_fruit_fixture.without(:name)) end

So having fewer valid fixtures, and remove/add values as i need them to test.

so having some kind of shortcut for name and the name of the fixture mightn't be horrible.

- james

John_Barnette · October 23, 2007, 4:49pm

I still think the syntax is a little wet... When you're just specifying lists of things (like, apples, oranges and grapes):

I see what you're going for, but I actually haven't run in to the need for something like that: If it's a simple list that you're rarely going to be adding properties to, why not write it out in expanded form the one time and be done? OTOH, if you find yourself adding *any* properties to the list entries, you're going to want them in expanded form anyways.

I'm trying to keep Rathole's changes as minimal as possible: I think keeping things very focused will increase the chances of getting this (or something like it) folded back into Rails proper.

It should be pretty darn easy for you to write a plugin that provides the features you're looking for, though.

~ j.