Factory_bot: Factory not registered error depending on names of factory files

[aharpole]

If I have a factory for HourlyViewCount and one of its fields is the ID for a VideoParticipant (created by a factory), FactoryGirl will give the error: Factory not registered: video_participant (ArgumentError)

However, if I take the name of the file hourly_view_count_factory.rb and rename it to zzhourly_view_count_factory.rb, FactoryGirl loads the dependent factory first and there is no problem. However, that solution isn't necessarily going to be very scalable if my factory dependencies get sufficiently complex.

Is there a better solution? I assume that if I require the dependent factory's file then I'll get an error later that the factory's already registered.

[joshuaclayton]

Can you paste the code? My guess is that your factory looks something like this:

# spec/factories/post.rb
FactoryGirl.define do
  factory :post do
    user_id FactoryGirl.create(:user).id
  end
end

# spec/factories/user.rb
FactoryGirl.define do
  factory :user
end

You'll want to evaluate the user_id at runtime, though, instead of when the factory file is read:

# spec/factories/post.rb
FactoryGirl.define do
  factory :post do
    user_id { FactoryGirl.create(:user).id }
  end
end

The result is twofold: first, it will now work (which is good!) and second, it'll get re-run every time you create the factory, which means it'll behave correctly (also good!). Let me know how it goes!

[aharpole]

You are indeed correct! I refactored my factory just slightly to use something like

FactoryGirl.define do
  factory :post do
    user FactoryGirl.create(:user)
  end
end

and that did still exhibit the issue, and sure enough, putting that as a block does make the factory behave correctly, which is great! And that explanation of when these things gets evaluated clears up a lot of odd behaviors I was seeing and getting confused about a few weeks back, so thanks!