when does factory girl create objects in db?

Question

I am trying to simulate a session using FactoryGirl/shoulda (it worked with fixtures but i am having problems with using factories). I have following factories (user login and email both have unique validations):

Factory.define :user do |u|   u.login 'quentin'  u.email '[email protected]' end  Factory.define :session_user, :class => Session do |ses|   ses.association :user, :factory => :user  ses.session_id 'session_user' end 

and here's the test

class MessagesControllerTest < ActionController::TestCase   context "normal user" do   setup do     @request.session[:user_id]=Factory(:user).id    @request.session[:session_id]=Factory(:session_user).session_id   end    should "be able to access new message creation" do    get :new    assert_response :success   end  end end 

but when i run rake test:functionals, I get this test result

 1) Error:    test: normal user should be able to access new message creation. (MessagesControllerTest):   ActiveRecord::RecordInvalid: Validation failed: Account name already exists!, Email already exists! 

which means that record already exists in db when I am referring to it in the test setup. Is there something I don't understand here? does FactoryGirl create all factories in db on startup?

rails 2.3.5/shoulda/FactoryGirl

Answer 1

Factory(:user) is a shortcut for Factory.create(:user) so within your setup you are creating two objects and saving them to the database.

Factory.build(:user) will create you a user record without saving it to the DB.

EDIT

Within your session_user factory you are creating a user and then creating another within your test setup. FactoryGirl will create a new user record because you have the association in the session_user factory.

You can either get your user instance from the session_user object as follows :-

 context "normal user" do   setup do    session = Factory(:session_user)      @request.session[:session_id] = session.session_id    @request.session[:user_id] = session.user_id   end 

or you can add some details to the user factory to ensure unique name and email addresses as follows :-

Factory.define :user do |u|   u.sequence(:login) {|n| "quentin#{n}" }  u.sequence(:email) {|n| "quentin#{n}@example.com"} end