Question

Howcome when I use FactoryGirl to create a record and later update said record the factorygirl instance isn’t updated? For example if I have the following factory and rspec test:

factory :foo do
  bar false
end

Inside of an rspec test:

foo = FactoryGirl.create(:foo)
Foo.first.update_attribute(:bar, true)
expect(foo.bar).to eq(true) #foo.bar is false and will fail

If I change foo.bar in that last line to Foo.first.bar it passes, why the variance? Is the FactoryGirl instance not directly associated to the record? Performing the test expect(foo).to eq(Foo.first) returns true so are they not the same object?

Answer 1

I think you might have to change

expect(foo.bar).to eq(true)

to

expect(foo.reload.bar).to eq(true)

By the way, you might like to know about be_true:

expect(foo.reload.bar).to be_true