sergioalvz/backbone.factotum

A factory lib for creating Backbone entities

Backbone.Factotum

A Backbone fully-compatible factory lib for creating JavaScript objects.

Example

factories.js

/*
 *
 * Let's suppose we have defined the following entities somewhere:
 *
 * const Job = Backbone.Model.extend({});
 *
 * const JobCollection = Backbone.Collection.extend({ model: Job });
 *
 * const User = Backbone.Model.extend({
 *   parse(attrs) {
 *     this.jobs = new JobCollection(attrs.jobs);
 *
 *     return _.omit(attrs, 'jobs');
 *   }
 * });
 *
 *
 */

const Factotum = require('backbone.factotum');

const Job = require('../job');
const User = require('../user');

Factotum.define('job', Job, { name: Factotum.sequence((i) => `Job ${i}`) });

Factotum.define('user', User, {
  id: Factotum.sequence((i) => i),
  name: 'Henry Chinaski',
  jobs: Factotum.create('job', 5)
});

user.spec.js

const Factotum = require('backbone.factotum');

const JobCollection = require('../jobCollection');

describe('User', function() {
  it('creates a user model with a collection of jobs', function() {
    const user = Factotum.create('user', { parse: true });

    user.jobs.should.be.an.instanceof(JobCollection);
  });
});

Features

This lib is heavily inspired in factory_girl, so they way for working with both of them is pretty similar.

• Sequences can be defined by using Factotum.sequence

Factotum.sequence((i) => `My sequence item ${i}`)

• Factory definitions receive an object with the expected attributes.

Factotum.define('user', User, {
  id: Factotum.sequence((i) => i),
  name: 'Henry Chinaski',
});

• Several objects can be created at once by passing an additional parameter to Factotum.create

const users = Factotum.create('user', 10);

• Backbone options such as parse can be bridged from Factotum to the required object initialization

const users = Factotum.create('user', 10, { parse: true });

backbone.factotum's Issues

Factotum.create could received parameters to be used during the definition

In some scenarios, I want to create the same entity but changing some of its attribute. I would like to be able to do it with just one definition instead of having several entity definitions quite similar.

If you consider that it makes sense taking into account for what this library was created, please let me know... I could think in how it should be implemented and even create a pull requests ;)