FactoryHag

This is a cheesy knockoff of the magnificent factory_girl.

Some things I like about factories:

• Testing becomes faster, especially so the more tests that need to leverage the same model.
• Tests are more readable, because only the pertinent attributes of a model need to be set in any given test.

Anyway, check out the real deal if you need more information on factories in general.

Requirements

• PHP 5.3. I wanted to leverage the newer features of PHP, specifically namespaces.
• Zend Framework. It's what I'm familiar with, though I've grown increasingly dissatisfied with Zend_Db_Table as an ORM. The code is written so that it wouldn't be very difficult to abstract out this requirement, I just haven't had any real need to.

Usage

Drop it in your app somewhere. I use library, but folks are probably using vendor now? Whatever floats your boat.

Right now, I require_once a file called tests/factories.php. It looks a little something like this:

// util provides a bunch of quick shortcuts to FactoryHag methods.
require_once 'FactoryHag/util.php';

use FactoryHag as Hag; // 'cause I'm too lazy to type FactoryHag

// then define your factories:

Hagdefine('user', array(
  'username' => 'test',
  'password' => 'secret',
));

So then a test file might look like this:

use FactoryHag as Hag;

class UserTest extends PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase
{
  public function tearDown()
  {
    Hagflush();
  }

  public function testUsernameEqualsWhateverItIsSetTo()
  {
    $user = Hagf('user');
    $this->assertEquals('test', $user->username);
  }
}

That's a pretty crap test, but hopefully it gets the idea across. A couple things to note:

• Hagflush. In the tearDown method, I'm calling FactoryHagflush, which wipes out any records created by FactoryHag, hopefully getting the database back to a somewhat more pristine state.
• Hagf. This is the method that creates a new record and saves it in the database. It's short for FactoryHagfactory, but I like to save typing.

Also, you can override the factory defaults. Here's how that test might look if you did that:

public function testUsernameEqualsWhateverItIsSetTo()
{
  $user = Hagf('user', array('username' => 'mclovin'));
  $this->assertEquals('mclovin', $user->username);
}

Limitations

• Current functionality is limited to an extremely small subset of factory_girl.
  • There are no lazily initalized attributes, though I imagine this is possible with callbacks. It's something I'll probably get around to if I keep with it.
  • There is no equivalent to factory_girl's build or attributes_for. FactoryHag creates a record and saves it. I'm sure that will be trivial to implement, I just haven't needed it yet.
• This isn't a problem with the 'Hag necessarily, but if PHPUnit errors out of a test for some reason, it can often leave the database in an unknown state. I guess this can probably be mitigated by doing some better setup in the PHPUnit test cases.