Problem with non activerecord associations in factory girl

Question

I just started to use factory girl to replace fixtures when I am testing. I am working on a twitter client and I am trying to use factory girl to create the twitter objects for testing. When I create them individually it is fine. But, if I try to associate them I get the error below.

Factory.define :status, :class => Twitter::Status, :default_strategy => :build do |t|
  t.text 'Test Twitter Status message'
  t.association :user, :factory => :twitter_user #this line causes the problems
end

Factory.define :twitter_user, :class => Twitter::User, :default_strategy => :stub do |u|
  u.profile_image_url "#{RAILS_ROOT}/public/images/rails.png"
end

The t.association :user, :factory => :twitter_user causes the problems because when it is there this exception is thrown. Is there anyway to fix this? Or is factory girl just designed for activerecord objects? Thanks

   NoMethodError: undefined method `save!' for #<Twitter::User:0x4af3de46>
  /usr/local/share/jruby-1.1.6/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/thoughtbot-factory_girl-1.2.0/lib/factory_girl/proxy/create.rb:5:in `result'
/usr/local/share/jruby-1.1.6/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/thoughtbot-factory_girl-1.2.0/lib/factory_girl/factory.rb:293:in `run'
/usr/local/share/jruby-1.1.6/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/thoughtbot-factory_girl-1.2.0/lib/factory_girl/factory.rb:237:in `create'
/usr/local/share/jruby-1.1.6/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/thoughtbot-factory_girl-1.2.0/lib/factory_girl/proxy/build.rb:17:in `associate'
/usr/local/share/jruby-1.1.6/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/thoughtbot-factory_girl-1.2.0/lib/factory_girl/attribute/association.rb:13:in `add_to'
/usr/local/share/jruby-1.1.6/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/thoughtbot-factory_girl-1.2.0/lib/factory_girl/factory.rb:290:in `run'
/usr/local/share/jruby-1.1.6/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/thoughtbot-factory_girl-1.2.0/lib/factory_girl/factory.rb:288:in `each'
/usr/local/share/jruby-1.1.6/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/thoughtbot-factory_girl-1.2.0/lib/factory_girl/factory.rb:288:in `run'
/usr/local/share/jruby-1.1.6/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/thoughtbot-factory_girl-1.2.0/lib/factory_girl/factory.rb:217:in `build'
test/functional/tweet_feeds_controller_test.rb:12:in `test_Display_friends_timeline_for_the_'amber'_user'
/usr/local/share/jruby-1.1.6/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activesupport-2.2.2/lib/active_support/testing/setup_and_teardown.rb:94:in `run_with_callbacks_and_mocha'

Answer 1

I'm pretty sure that factory girl is just for ActiveRecord objects, you should just be able to mock up and stub a Twitter::User object rather than use a Factory, if you were using rSpec maybe (if my syntax is right):

@twitter_user = mock(Twitter::User, :profile_image =>"#{RAILS_ROOT}/public/images/rails.png")

and then attach that to your object that needs it.

This might not be quite right, but it's the path I would start down.