Non-ActiveRecord objects in FactoryGirl

Creating non-ActiveRecord objects with FactoryGirl is possible. Classically, a constructor is used to set all the data attributes of an object.

class ParsedString
  attr_reader :abc, :def
  def initialize(string)
    @abc, @def = string.split(?|)
  end
end

In the above class the attributes are set in the constructor by passing in a string that gets split into two parts on \|. Lets use instantiate_with to determine how the object gets instantiated in FactoryGirl.

factory :parsed_string do
  initial_value "123|456"

  initialize_with { new(initial_value) }
end

And then in the test we can FactoryGirl.build, like:

ps = FactoryGirl.build(:parsed_string)
expect(ps.abc).to eq 123
expect(ps.def).to eq 456