This gem facilitates the creation of JSON fixtures for javascript testing in ruby apps. While testing composite views in front end "MVC" frameworks (Backbone, Ember, Angular etc) you might need to create some quite complicated json fixtures to seed the models for the tests.

This gem will use your FactoryGirl factories to create these json fixtures for you.

Furthermore it supports custom serializers (e.g. active_model_serializers or any class that takes a model in its constructor and responds to to_json).

The fixtures can be loaded in your tests using a javascript library such as jasmine-jquery.

The gem has been used only in a Rails project in combination with factory_girl_rails but it should work with factory_girl gem as well.

Add these lines to your application's Gemfile:

group :test do
  gem 'factory_girl_rails'
  gem 'factory_girl_json'
end

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install factory_girl_json

First, define some factories with factory girl.

FactoryGirl.define do
  factory :user do
    sequence(:name) {|n| "user name #{n}"}
    sequence(:email) {|n| "useremail#{n}@email.com"}
    age 12
  end

  factory :user_with_posts, parent: :user do
    after(:create) do |user|
      create :post, user: user
    end
  end
end


class UserSerializer
  def initialize(user)
    @user = user
  end

  def to_json(options = {})
    @user.to_json(include: :posts)
  end
end

There is one available rake task

RAILS_ENV=test bundle exec rake factory_girl_json:export[factory,size,serializer] # Note: no space between rake arguments

For example, running

RAILS_ENV=test bundle exec rake factory_girl_json:export[user]

will produce a user.json file with data:

{
  "age": 12,
  "email": "[email protected]",
  "id": 1,
  "name": "user name 1"
}

RAILS_ENV=test bundle exec rake factory_girl_json:export[user,2]

will produce a 2.user.json file with data:

[
  {
    "age": 12,
    "email": "[email protected]",
    "id": 1,
    "name": "user name 1"
  },
  {
    "age": 12,
    "email": "[email protected]",
    "id": 2,
    "name": "user name 2"
  }
]

RAILS_ENV=test bundle exec rake factory_girl_json:export['user_with_posts',1,UserSerializer]

will produce get a user_with_posts.user_serializer.json file with data:

{
  "age": 12,
  "email": "[email protected]",
  "id": 1,
  "name": "user name 1",
  "posts": [
    {
      "body": "post body",
      "id": 1,
      "title": "post title",
      "user_id": 1
    }
  ]
}

if Rails is used it will write the json files to spec/javascripts/fixtures/json or test/javascripts/fixtures/json otherwise it uses the current path.

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Added some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request

Backbone-Factory

Nikos Gereoudakis