how to put debugger in factory girl?

Question

How do you debug factory_girl? i've tried to put debugger in there but i just cant. I just want to test why my associations aren't working right

Westernism

Answer 1

How did you use the debugger? If you tried to use it in test environment, I'm not surprised it didn't work. But factory_girl is not limited to test environment.

Simply require factory_girl gem and relevant factories in development environment, start the server with debugger (or just console) and you're set for debugging.

UPDATE

I have this setup in https://github.com/lstejskal/icanhazblog. When you install it and run 'rails console', you can then do stuff like:

$ a = Factory.create :article
=> #<Article _id: 4dc27b867319e80fb2000001, created_at: 2011-05-05 10:27:18 UTC,
updated_at: 2011-05-05 10:27:18 UTC, title: "Article 1", content: "This is a content
for Article 1.", visible: true, published_at: 2011-02-11 23:00:00 UTC, tags: ["ruby",
"rails", "sinatra"]> 
$ a.title
=> "Article 1" 

Just add something like this when starting in development mode:

require 'factory_girl'
# require factories
Dir["#{PATH_TO_FACTORIES}/*.rb"].each { |f| require f }

Lavonia

i tried putting the debugger in the factories themselves..where did you put yours? – Westernism

I would start it with test environment like this: RAILS_ENV=test rails console – Singletary

Make sure to reset your test database between each test: rake db:reset RAILS_ENV=test – Singletary

I don't think that running rails console in test environment will work. That won't include test/test_helper.rb where the factories are usually set up. – Lavonia

Thanks! Just to clarify, start script/console test, then paste the lines above under 'when starting in development mode', (edit as required). (Note, running Rails 2.3.5) – Insipience

Yes. You can use any environment, but it will work in test just as well. – Lavonia

NOTE: Instead of requiring the factories manually, you can also use FactoryGirl.find_definitions if your factories are in the default locations spec/factories or test/factories. – Priestridden

Doesn't answer the question, how can I get interactive debugging inside my factory girl set up code (such as in an 'after_build'). Why shouldn't I want to do that? – Tosch

Yea, putting a debugger into the factory is often the only way to debug e.g. odd interactions with activerecord callbacks. Whether you invoke it from a test or the console doesn't change the fact that often bugs occur inside the FactoryBot stack, which is "magic"ly buggy. – Riffe

This doesn't really answer the question "how do I debug factories?" – Engross