It's for making test data generation easy. Inspired by factory-worker et al.
Define reusable data generators in fixtures/test-data.js like such:
module.exports = (Factory) => {
// you'll be passed a Factory object with a models property on it that includes all the loopback models
const {Account, User} = Factory.models
// derive your generator from an existing model
Factory.define('Account', Account, {
pricing_tier: 'Basic',
})
// add related data using 'assemble' - this additional record will be created as a prerequisite
Factory.define('User', User, {
account_id: Factory.assemble('Account'),
email: 'foo@bar.com',
password: 'foobar',
user_type: 'Member',
first_name: 'Kevin',
last_name: 'Doolittle',
})
}Then in your mocha tests you can have:
describe('my tests', function() {
before('initialize factory', function() {
const definitions = require('../fixtures/test-data')
const {models} = app = require('../server/server.js') # or where ever your loopback server is defined
this.Factory = F({models, definitions})
})
describe('Account', function() {
beforeEach('create a user', function(done) {
Factory.create('Account', {email: 'foo@bar.com', password: 'foobar'}, done)
})
})
})##Promises
Includes support for promises:
beforeEach('create a user', async () => {
await Factory.create('Account', {email: 'foo@bar.com', password: 'foobar'})
})TODO: document the rest of the features:
createRef
assembleGroup
createGroup
clearAll
service
For more complex relationships, like if you want to seed a relational database, loopback-factory is designed to work well with a service composition tool called microql.
Note that the sample-project has a modified server.js file - the start method has been modified to call a callback when complete, and only call it once. This makes testing easier - you can require the app from multiple tests and ask it to start, and if it has already started it will just return the existing instance.