Question

Trying something simple and overlooking the obvious I’m sure. Shouldn’t Factory_Girl be automatically creating the association? If so why does “GET index” spec below fail because event_id is nil?

Event has_many :posts

#post.rb
  ...
  belongs_to :event
  validates :event_id, :presence => true
  ...

#factories.rb
Factory.define :event do |event|
  event.name "The Long Event Title"
end

Factory.define :post do |post|
  post.title "This is a post"
  post.association :event
end


#posts_controller_spec.rb
before(:each) do
  @attr = Factory.attributes_for(:post)
end

describe "GET index" do
  it "assigns all posts as @posts" do
    post = @user.posts.create(@attr)    ### <-- event_id not assigned?
    # post = FactoryGirl.create(:post)  ### <-- this doesn't work either
    get :index
    assigns(:posts).should eq([post])
  end
end

Edit: Additional spec example:

describe "POST create" do
    describe "with valid params" do
      it "creates a new Post" do
        expect {
          post :create, :post => @attr, :event => Factory.create(:event)  <- fail
        }.to change(Post, :count).by(1)
      end

Answer 1

From the FactoryGirl wiki: https://github.com/thoughtbot/factory_girl/wiki/Usage

# Attribute hash (ignores associations)
user_attributes = Factory.attributes_for(:user)

So you are not getting an event_id, and that’s why it’s failing.

Also, you said you tried post = FactoryGirl.create(:post) but you should do post = Factory.create(:post) and that will get it to work.

Perhaps in your before() block you should just create and save the post, unless you have a test that requires it to not be saved yet.