Factory Worker

Factory Worker is a node.js library that creates the Factory pattern for object stores. It assumes the objects are building respond to new() and save(). Other than that, it does not care.

Installation

Factory-worker is available on npm:

npm install factory-worker

Usage

To begin, we need to define our Factory. We do this with the Factory.define method:

  var Factory = require('factory-worker');
  
  Factory.define("profile", Profile, {
    "username":"Coolguy123",
    "first_name":"Cool",
    "last_name":"Guy",
    "created_at": function(){
      return new Date();
    }
  });

In the example above, we've created the "profile" Factory for the class Profile with our default attributes.

The created_at attribute will be filled dynamically by evaluating the function at object build time. This is useful to dynamically fill attributes with a name generator, e.g. https://github.com/marak/Faker.js/

build(factory, [attributes], [callback])

Builds an instance of the factory, overriding the factory with the attributes hash if passed.

If a callback is passed, it is possible to use callback functions for building attributes. The callback is detected by checking if the attribute function will accept arguments. Here is an example that will create BlogEntry for a Comment object and set the foreign key accordingly.

  var Factory = require('factory-worker');
 
  Factory.define("comment", Comment, {
    "text": "Comment text",
    "blogEntry": function(callback){
      Factory.create("BlogEntry", function(err, entry){
        callback(err, entry._id);
      });
    }
  });
 
  Factory.build("comment", {text: "some other comment text"}, function(err, comment){
    console.log(err, comment);
  });

create(factory, [attributes], callback)

Calls the build function followed by calling save(callback) on the created object.

See the examples directory for more information.

Testing

FactoryWorker uses jessie for tests. The test suite can be invoked with npm test.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome, submit a pull request and I'll happily take a look. I only ask that you don't alter the version of the library in your pull request.

Credit

This library was inspired by factory_girl because I wanted something similar while working in NodeJS. It is by no means as fully functional as factory_girl, but it's a start.

• Andrew Nordman