Question

In order to debug a factory I’ve inserted rescue binding.pry at the end of a problematic line:

after_create do |my_object, proxy|
  my_object.foreign_key_id = proxy.generated_attribute rescue binding.pry

Unfortunately, inside the resulting FactoryGirl::Declaration::Implicit context I can’t seem to access the context like I would in “normal” code (NameError: undefined local variable or method `proxy' for #<FactoryGirl::Declaration::Implicit:0x0...>). How do I inspect and manipulate my_object and proxy within the Pry session?

The code is called as part of the background of a Cucumber feature:

Given the following my_objects exist:
| property |
| value    |

factory_girl_rails and factory_girl/step_definitions.rb are required by the support script.

Answer 1

In order to allow attribute names to define attributes without having a block argument, factory_girl evaluates the definition block using instance_eval and undefines most private methods on Object, including binding. That means that when you call binding.pry above, you’re not calling pry on the binding for that block; instead, you’re defining a new attribute with a name of “binding” and invoking pry on the created attribute definition.

You can get around this by using Kernel.binding.pry instead.