Fixtures

Fixtures

Sometimes you want the same object returned every time, for those cases phactory supports a special syntax for fixtures

Suppose you had the following phactory:

<?php

class CategoryPhactory
{
	public function blueprint()
	{
		return array(
			'title' => 'Category #{sn}',
			'description' => 'Description #{sn}',
			'key' => 'category#{sn}',
		);
	}

	public function tshirt()
	{
		return array(
			'title' => 'T-shirt Category',
			'key' => 'tshirt',
		);
	}
}

If we were to then try to get two tshirt categories this is what we'd see:

<?php

$one = Phactory::category('tshirt');
$two = Phactory::category('tshirt');

echo $one === $two ? 'same object' : 'different objects';
// echo's 'different objects'

Every time you called Phactory::category('tshirt') you'd get a new instance. To make it return the same instance every time, you'd need to change this:

<?php

class CategoryPhactory
{
	...
	public function tshirt_fixture()
	{
		return array(
			'title' => 'T-shirt Category',
			'key' => 'tshirt',
		);
	}
	...
}

Now if we test the results of this again this is what happens:

<?php

$one = Phactory::category('tshirt');
$two = Phactory::category('tshirt');

echo $one === $two ? 'same object' : 'different objects';
// echo's 'same object'

All that we've done is append _fixture to the tshirt method, but now it will always return the same instance every time. Note that this only works on blueprint variations, if you were to define blueprint_fixture method all that would happen is your Phactory wouldn't work.