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fixtures-refactoring.md

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Keep Your Fixtures Dry

  1. Fixture Inheritance
  2. Including files
  3. Variables
  4. Parameters

Fixture inheritance

Base fixtures, to be extended from, can be created to be able to only need to define less additional values in a set of common fixture definitions.

By declaring a fixture as a template using the (template) flag, Alice will set the instance as a template for that file. Template instances are not persisted.

Templates can also make use of inheritance themselves, by extending from other templates, allowing you to create, mix and match templates. For example:

Nelmio\Entity\User:
    user_bare (template):
        username: '<username()>'
    user_full (template, extends user_bare):
        name: '<firstName()>'
        lastname: '<lastName()>'
        city: '<city()>'

Templates can be extended by other fixtures making use of the (extends) flag followed by the name of the template to extend.

Nelmio\Entity\User:
    user (template):
        username: '<username()>'
        age: '<numberBetween(1, 20)>'

    user1 (extends user):
        name: '<firstName()>'
        lastname: '<lastName()>'
        city: '<city()>'
        age: '<numberBetween(1, 50)>'

Inheritance also allows to extend from several templates. The last declared extends will always override values from previous declared extends templates. However, extension properties will never override values set explicitly in the fixture spec itself.

In the following example, the age from user_young will override the age from user in user1, while username will remain user1:

Nelmio\Entity\User:
    user (template):
        username: '<username()>'
        age: '<numberBetween(1, 40)>'

    user_young (template):
        age: '<numberBetween(1, 20)>'

    user1 (extends user, extends user_young):
        username: user1
        name: '<firstName()>'
        lastname: '<lastName()>'
        city: '<city()>'

Including files

You may include other files from your fixtures using the top-level include key:

include:
    - relative/path/to/file.yml
    - /absolute/path/to/another/file.yml

Nelmio\Entity\User:
    user1 (extends user, extends user_young):
        name: '<firstName()>'
        lastname: '<lastName()>'
        city: '<city()>'

In relative/path/to/file.yml:

Nelmio\Entity\User:
    user (template):
        username: '<username()>'
        age: '<numberBetween(1, 40)>'

In /absolute/path/to/another/file.yml:

Nelmio\Entity\User:
    user_young (template):
        age: '<numberBetween(1, 20)>'

All files are merged in one data set before generation, and the includer's content takes precedence over included files' fixtures in case of duplicate keys.

Variables

For some advanced use cases you sometimes need to reference one property from another, for example to generate the update date while making sure it is after the creation date. If you simply use two random dates it might be that they are reversed, but Alice let's you refer to other properties using the traditional PHP $variable notation.

Let's add created/modified dates to our group:

Nelmio\Entity\User:
    # ...

Nelmio\Entity\Group:
    group1:
        name: Admins
        owner: '@user1'
        members: '<numberBetween(1, 10)>x @user*'
        created: '<dateTimeBetween("-200 days", "now")>'
        updated: '<dateTimeBetween($created, "now")>'

As you can see, we make sure that the update date is between the creation date and the current time, which ensure the data will look real enough.

Parameters

When using the Yaml loader, you can also set global parameters that will be inserted everywhere those values are used to help with readability. For example:

parameters:
    ebay_domain_name: ebay.us

Nelmio\Entity\Shop:
    shop1:
        domain: '<{ebay_domain_name}>'

TODO: add doc regarding dynamic parameters cf. #354

Additionally, you can pass in a list of defined parameters as the second argument of {File,Data}LoaderInterface::load{File,Data}().

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