Rails instantiated fixtures

Here is a sample Ruby on Rails fixture named as newsletter:

newsletter:
  name: foo
  message: bar
  first_name: foo
  last_name: bar

There are two popular ways to use this fixture in your Rails tests. The first one is directly calling the name of fixture file, followed by a symbol stating the name of any individual fixture:

class NewsletterTest < ActiveSupport::TestCase
  test 'a sample test' do
    assert newsletters(:newsletter).valid?
  end
end

And the other one is assigning fixtures to an instance variable in the setup block:

class NewsletterTest < ActiveSupport::TestCase
  setup do
    @newsletter = newsletters(:tenant_newsletter)
  end

  test 'a sample test' do
    assert @newsletter.valid?
  end
end

When you would like to stick with instance variables, there is an easier way, instantiated fixtures:

class NewsletterTest < ActiveSupport::TestCase
  self.use_instantiated_fixtures = true

  test 'a sample test' do
    assert @newsletter.valid?
  end
 end

instantiated_fixtures automatically creates instance variables for each fixture item, and they become accessible as instance variables with the same name. Imagine a more populated fixture like this:

city:
    name: Samsun
country:
    name: Turkey
region:
    name: Black Sea

when you enable instantiated_fixtures you will automatically have three different instance variables named as @city, @country and @region. These instance variables will immediately be accessible from anywhere in your test file.

This behaviour might come in handy for some cases but please be aware of the risk of conflicting variables! Since instantiated_fixtures will give you an instance variable for each item, you must make sure that you don’t use these variable names anywhere else in your test files, in order to prevent possible conflicts and confusions.

Cheers.