Does a framework like Factory Girl exist for Java?

Question

Factory Girl is a handy framework in rails for easily creating instances of models for testing.

From the Factory Girl home page:

factory_girl allows you to quickly define prototypes for each of your models and ask for instances with properties that are important to the test at hand.

An example (also from the home page):

Factory.sequence :email do |n|
    "somebody#{n}@example.com"
end

# Let's define a factory for the User model. The class name is guessed from the
# factory name.
Factory.define :user do |f|
    # These properties are set statically, and are evaluated when the factory is
    # defined.
    f.first_name 'John'
    f.last_name  'Doe'
    f.admin      false
    # This property is set "lazily." The block will be called whenever an
    # instance is generated, and the return value of the block is used as the
    # value for the attribute.
    f.email      { Factory.next(:email) }
end

if I need a user a can just call

test_user = Factory(:user, :admin => true)

which will yield a user with all the properties specified in the factory prototype, except for the admin property which I have specified explicitly. Also note that the email factory method will yield a different email each time it is called.

I'm thinking it should be pretty easy to implement something similar for Java, but I don't want to reinvent the wheel.

P.S: I know about both JMock and EasyMoc, however I am not talking about a mocking framework here.

Answer 1

If your model objects are simple, there is not reason to use a framework to create them, just simply use 'new' operator. If you have complex model (complex relationships) then you can use spring to bind them together (even in test scenarios you can use spring)

• but this is simply for data objects, if you are talking about instantiating objects that are doing something, its recommended to mock/stub the external relationships instead of using real instances.

Answer 2

1. I understand this isn't for everybody, but you could write Ruby test code against your Java code. (JTestR)
2. The preferred way of doing this in Java is using the Test Data Builder pattern. I would argue that this approach doesn't really warrant introducing the complexity of a framework or external dependency. I just don't see how you could specify much less using a framework and get anything more out of it... the Builder syntax is essentially equivalent to your FactoryGirl syntax. (Someone feel free to convince me otherwise!)

Answer 3

I know this isn't exactly what you are looking for...

I the past I've written some code that using reflection to populate a beans values. The basic idea is to find all the setters and call each with a dummy value. My version set all Strings as the name of the field setName would be called with "name", then set all ints as 1, booleans to true etc.

I then used this in conjuction with the patterns similar to Object mother and Test Data Builder.

It provided a good start for test data and any fields that required specific values could be set explicitly as part of the test.

Hope this helps.

Answer 4

One possible library for doing this is Usurper.

However, if you want to specify properties of the objects you are creating, then Java's static typing makes a framework pointless. You'd have to specify the property names as strings so that the framework could look up property accessors using reflection or Java Bean introspection. That would make refactoring much more difficult.

It's much simpler to just new up the objects and call their methods. If you want to avoid lots of boilerplate code in tests, the Test Data Builder pattern can help.