Find or create record through factory_girl association

Question

I have a User model that belongs to a Group. Group must have unique name attribute. User factory and group factory are defined as:

Factory.define :user do |f|   f.association :group, :factory => :group   # ... end  Factory.define :group do |f|   f.name "default" end 

When the first user is created a new group is created too. When I try to create a second user it fails because it wants to create same group again.

Is there a way to tell factory_girl association method to look first for an existing record?

Note: I did try to define a method to handle this, but then I cannot use f.association. I would like to be able to use it in Cucumber scenarios like this:

Given the following user exists:   | Email          | Group         |   | [email protected] | Name: mygroup | 

and this can only work if association is used in Factory definition.

Answer 1

You can to use initialize_with with find_or_create method

FactoryGirl.define do   factory :group do     name "name"     initialize_with { Group.find_or_create_by_name(name)}   end    factory :user do     association :group   end end 

It can also be used with id

FactoryGirl.define do   factory :group do     id     1     attr_1 "default"     attr_2 "default"     ...     attr_n "default"     initialize_with { Group.find_or_create_by_id(id)}   end    factory :user do     association :group   end end 

For Rails 4

The correct way in Rails 4 is Group.find_or_create_by(name: name), so you'd use

initialize_with { Group.find_or_create_by(name: name) }  

instead.