Question

I am in chapter 7 of the railstutorial.org, and the author is starting to explain less and less of the syntax and details of the course.

I dont understand the following syntax he uses when creating a user with Factory Girl:

 Factory.define :user do |user|
  user.name                  "Michael Hartl"
  user.email                 "[e-mail]"
  user.password              "foobar"
  user.password_confirmation "foobar"
end

I am not copying and pasting the code, so initially, after reading, I wrote my code like this:

user.name = 'Michael Hartl'
etc

and the tests didnt run. After rereading that section, I saw that the author doesnt use the =. What does this mean? If I understood correctly, Factory girl creates a instance of User, and then assigns it these attributes. So how is user.name = ‘whatever’ incorrect?

I really hate not understanding stuff when doing tutorials, so I’m stuck here until I make sense of it…

Answer 1

This: user.name = 'Michael Hartl' doesn’t work, because the creator of Factory Girl chose a different syntax, namely: user.name "Michael Hartl". I guess you just have accept that Factory Girl works like this. If you want to know why you have to ask the creator.