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Faktory

Faktory is a tool for easily building test objects ala FactoryGirl, but for PHP. It's still in it's early stages, but give it a go if you're interested, and open issues for the features it's missing that you think are really important.

Installing with Composer

You can install this package via Composer on the command line from your project's root:

Laravel 4

If you are using Laravel 4, you can get started very quickly by registering the included service provider.

Modify the providers array in app/config/app.php to include the FaktoryServiceProvider:

Add the Faktory facade to the aliases array in app/config/app.php:

You can now start using Faktory by calling methods directly on the Faktory facade:

Outside of Laravel 4

To use outside of Laravel 4, just instantiate a new Faktory. Make sure you register this as a singleton in your favorite dependency injection container, since you probably want to be using the same instance everywhere.

Note: When using outside of Laravel 4 and not having access to the Faktory facade, you will need to make sure you use your $faktory instance in any nested closures that need to generate other objects. Sucks but that's PHP.

Using Faktory

Defining factories

Define factories anywhere you want.

In Laravel 4, I've been creating a factories.php file in my tests directory and adding it to app/bootstrap/testing.php like so:

Basic definition

The most basic factory definition requires a class name and a closure that defines the default attributes for the factory. This will define a factory named after that class that generates instances of that same class.

Using factories

Once you have your factories defined, you can very easily generate objects for your tests.

Objects can be generated using one of two different build strategies.

• build creates objects in memory only, without persisting them.
• create creates objects and persists them to whatever database you have set up in your testing environment.

Note: The create strategy is meant for Laravel 4's Eloquent ORM, but as long as your objects implement a save() method and a getKey() method to retrieve the object's ID, it should work outside of Eloquent.

To generate an object, simply call build or create and pass in the name of the factory you want to generate the object from.

Overriding attributes

The real benefit of using these factories appears when you are writing a test that requires your objects to satisfy some precondition, but you don't really care about the rest of the attributes.

You can specify the values you need for the attributes that matter for the test, and let the factory handle filling out the attributes you don't care about with default data so that the object is in a valid state.

If you just need to change some simple attributes to static values, you can just pass an array of attribute overrides as a second argument:

If you need to do something trickier, you can pass in a closure that provides all of the same functionality you get when actually defining the factory. This is most useful when working with relationships:

Named factories

Factories can also be given a name, so that you can define multiple factories for the same class that generate objects in different predefined states.

To define a named factory, pass the name as the second parameter, and move the callback to the third parameter.

Factory inheritance

You can create factories that inherit the attributes of an existing factory by nesting the definition. This allows you to define a basic factory, as well as more specific factories underneath it to generate objects in a specific state without having to redeclare the attributes that don't need to change.

Lazy attributes

If you don't want an attribute to be evaluated until you try to build an object, you can define that attribute as a closure.

Dependent attributes

You can also use lazy attributes to define attributes that depend on other attributes in the factory.

Unique attributes

Lazy attributes to the rescue again. The closure also takes an autoincrementing integer as it's second parameter, which is really handy for ensuring that a field value is unique.

Defining relationships

Faktory lets you easily define relationships between objects.

Currently, there is support for belongsTo, hasOne, and hasMany relationships.

Belongs to

Define a belongsTo relationship by assigning a belongsTo call to an attribute.

belongsTo() takes the name of the factory that should be used to generate the related object as the first argument, the name of the foreign key column as the second argument, and an optional array of override attributes as the third argument.

Has one

Define a hasOne relationship by assigning a hasOne call to an attribute.

hasOne() takes the name of the factory that should be used to generate the related object as the first argument, the name of the foreign key column (on the related object) as the second argument, and an optional array of override attributes as the third argument.

Has many

Define a hasMany relationship by assigning a hasMany call to an attribute.

hasMany() takes the name of the factory that should be used to generate the related objects as the first argument, the number of objects to generate as the second argument, the name of the foreign key column (on the related object) as the third argument, and an optional array of override attributes as the final argument.

Relationships and build strategies

Relationships are handled differently by each build strategy.

When using the build strategy, the related object(s) will be available directly as a property on the base object.

When using the create strategy, the related object(s) will be persisted to the database with the foreign key attribute set to match the ID of the base object, and nothing will actually be set on the actual attribute itself, allowing you to retrieve the related object through the methods you've actually defined in the base object's class.

Overriding relationship attributes

If you need to override attributes on a relationship when building or creating an object, you can do so by manipulating the actual relationship attribute itself.

Building multiple instances at once

You can use buildMany and createMany to generate multiple objects at once: