Fixtures Suck
When modeling complex business domains, not 3 model blog software, fixtures quickly become a quagmire. What's the size of your domain? Kevin was working on a project with 180 models. This quickly became unworkable even with only 1 fixture file per model. Fixtures don't scale well. Scenarios are also problematic as now you have to maintain a directory hierarchy of fixtures.
Use Data Generation instead
Factory Girl
# Define
Factory.define :user do |f|
f.first_name 'John'
f.last_name 'Doe'
end
# use
user = Factory(:user)
Object Daddy
Reopens your ActiveRecord class and adds generators for each attribute.
# define
class User << ActiveRecord::Base
generator_for :username, :method => :next_user
generator_for :email, :start => 'test@domain.com' do |prev|
user, domain = prev.split('@')
user.succ + '@' + domain
end
end
# use
@user = User.generate!
Others
Machinist
Foundry
Fixjour
One can point out that fixtures are inappropriate without a categorial denunciation. They're an entirely appropriate approach given certain problems - problems where the dataset is stable, or there are few writes.
Object mothers are great. Please, don't always use them. It's another tool in the toolbox.
Also, always use Fixjour, which I say only because I wrote it. :)