Factories

• Introduction
• Generating Factories
  • Model & Factory Discovery Conventions
• Creating Models Using Factories
  • Instantiating Models
  • Persisting Models
  • Ignore Model Event

Introduction

When testing your application or seeding your database, it might be necessary to insert a few records into your database beforehand. Instead of manually inputting values for each column, Goravel allows you to define a set of default attributes for each of your models by creating model factories.

To see an example of how to write a factory, you can check out the user_factory.go file located in your application's database/factories directory.

package factories

type UserFactory struct {
}

// Definition Define the model's default state.
func (f *UserFactory) Definition() map[string]any {
  return map[string]any{
    "Name": "Goravel",
  }
}

As you can see, in their most basic form, factories are structs that have a Definition method. The method returns the default set of attribute values that should be used when creating a model with the factory. To generate a range of random data, you can rely on brianvoe/gofakeit.

Generating Factories

To create a factory, run the make:factory Artisan command:

go run . artisan make:factory PostFactory

The new factory struct will be placed in your database/factories directory.

Model & Factory Discovery Conventions

After defining a factory, you can use the Factory() method in the model to bind the factory to the model:

package models

import (
  "github.com/goravel/framework/contracts/database/factory"
  "github.com/goravel/framework/database/orm"

  "goravel/database/factories"
)

type User struct {
  orm.Model
  Name   string
  Avatar string
  orm.SoftDeletes
}

func (u *User) Factory() factory.Factory {
  return &factories.UserFactory{}
}

Creating Models Using Factories

Instantiating Models

We can use the Make method to create models without persisting them in the database:

var user models.User
err := facades.Orm().Factory().Make(&user)

You may create a collection of many models using the Count method:

var users []models.User
err := facades.Orm().Factory().Count(2).Make(&users)

If you would like to override some of the default values of your models, you may pass map[string]any to the Make method. Only the specified attributes will be replaced while the rest of the attributes remain set to their default values as specified by the factory:

var user models.User
err := facades.Orm().Factory().Make(&user, map[string]any{
    "Avatar": "avatar",
})

Persisting Models

The Create method creates and saves model instances to the database using Orm's Save method.

var user models.User
err := facades.Orm().Factory().Create(&user)

var users []models.User
err := facades.Orm().Factory().Count(2).Create(&users)

You may override the factory's default model attributes by passing map[string]any of the attributes to the Create method:

var user models.User
err := facades.Orm().Factory().Create(&user, map[string]any{
    "Avatar": "avatar",
})

Ignore Model Event

There may be model event defined on the model, you can ignore those events with the CreateQuietly method:

var user models.User
err := facades.Orm().Factory().CreateQuietly(&user)