Functional Programming: A PragPub Anthology

The Typical Approaches

Most typical test cases use one of a handful of approaches.

• Explicit: an application can simply explicitly generate test data, leading to code that looks like this:

~~~
Person.create first_name: "Paul", last_name: "Revere"
~~~

The downside is that such code will get awkward once you’re creating enough entities with enough attributes. In short order, the data overwhelms the test.

• Through Fixtures: an application can create test data in tabular form, and then load all of that data into the application.

~~~
# person.csv
first_name, last_name
Paul, Revere
~~~

This strategy works all right, but leads to code that is hard to maintain as applications grow, because foreign keys are difficult to manage.

• Through templates: ...