FactoryGirl does not use active_record save method when creating records?

Question

I have an issue where the create method of FactoryGirl is not working as I would have thought it should. I have two example that I expect to do the same thing, but they don't.

Example 1

FactoryGirl.create(:subscription, contact: contact)

Example 2

FactoryGirl.build(:subscription, contact: contact).save

Additional snippets from my code

factory :subscription do        
    contact 
end

factory :contact do
    first_name   Faker::Name.first_name
    last_name    Faker::Name.last_name
    email_address Faker::Internet.email
end

Both examples run and create records in my tests. I check this by inspecting both objects after everything has run and check they have id's. However in my subscription class I am overriding the save method as below.

def save
    puts 'hello world'
    super
end

I would have expected factory_girl to call save and print out "hello world" since rails does. For example if I call the rails create or save method, it will print out "hello world". This has got me stumped.

Any help explaining why it does this is appreciated.

Answer 1

It looks like FactoryGirl uses the model's save! method, not save. Both of these methods directly call create_or_update (rather than save! calling save), so your custom save method is never executed.

Answer 2

I had a similar issue, since we used Sequel instead of ActiveRecord. This is the error I've got:

 got #<NoMethodError: undefined method `save!' for

I've solved it in this way:

module FactoryGirl
  module Syntax
    module Methods

      def create(factory_name, params)
        build(factory_name, params).save
      end
    end
  end
end

RSpec.configure do |config|
  config.include FactoryGirl::Syntax::Methods
end

Maybe is not too fancy.. but is a short and very simple way to get it working.. For example:

my_model = create(:my_model, :username => 'billyidol')