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What is the purpose of a `transient do` block in FactoryBot factories?


What is the purpose of transient do in FactoryBot factories?

I've seen a lot of factories that begin with something like below.

factory :car do
  owner nil
  other_attribute nil
end
...

I've found some information on this blog:
Using FactoryGirl to easily create complex data sets in Rails

But I still don't fully understand how and why to do this. My experience with FactoryBot is minimal.

Could anyone with some experience using FactoryBot share some insight?


Solution

  • transient attributes allow you to pass in data that isn’t an attribute on the model.

    Say you have a model called car with the following attributes:

    You want to capitalize the name of the car when you create the car model in the factory. What we can do is:

    factory :car do
      transient do
        # capitalize is not an attribute of the car
        capitalize  false
      end
    
      name           { "Jacky" }
      purchase_price { 1000 }
      model          { "Honda" }
     
      after(:create) do |car, evaluator|
        car.name.upcase! if evaluator.capitalize
      end
    end
    

    Hence, whenever you create the car factory and you want to capitalize the name. You can do

    car = FactoryGirl.create(:car, capitalize: true)
    car.name
    # => "JACKY"