Factories are used to generate fake data for testing.

Caseflow uses Factory Bot to implement our factory classes.

• spec/factories/

• Default factories should only contain the minimum amount of attributes required. Create new factories for different scenarios. If some attribute or association doesn't apply globally, don't set it on the default factory.

• Don't create associations with a block in factories. Example:

  factory :task do
    appeal { create(:legacy_appeal, vacols_case: create(:case)) }
  end

  Instead, use the documented way of setting up associations:

  # This will use the `appeal` factory
  factory :task do
    appeal
  end

  or if you want a different class and attributes for the association:

  factory :legacy_task do
    association :appeal, factory: :legacy_appeal
  end

  The problem with using create for associations in factories is it prevents the parent factory from being stubbed. For example, if we don't need to use the DB, we can use build_stubbed(:task), but if the task factory defines the appeal association by creating a new appeal, calling build_stubbed(:task) will write to the DB. We can get around that by specifying a stubbed appeal: build_stubbed(:task, appeal: build_stubbed(:appeal) but that is more verbose than necessary. The default should be to easily allow stubbing factories along with their associations.

N/A

Pattern	Description
Test	Used in tests