Factory Girl associations undefined method for what's supposed to be an association

Question

I'm trying to create an error with two FactoryGirl models. I have cars and car manufacturers. Cars belong to Car manufacturers so the foreign key/variable belongs in car. When I run my tests, I get this error.

Failure/Error: car = FactoryGirl.build(:car)
 NoMethodError:
   undefined method `car_manufacturer=' for #<Car:0x0000010437a7d0>

Here are my factories located in spec/factories folder

FactoryGirl.define do
  factory :car do
  color 'Black'
  year 2012
  mileage 50000
  description 'Badass used car'
  car_manufacturer
  end
end

FactoryGirl.define do
  factory :car_manufacturer do
  name 'Speed Racer Inc.'
  country 'Japan'
  end
end

I don't have anything set up in my associations validations because from what I understood, factory girl is seperate so this should work. Perhaps something is wrong in my spec:

scenario 'I want to associate a car with a car manufacturer' do
car_manufacturer = FactoryGirl.create(:car_manufacturer)
car = FactoryGirl.build(:car)
car_count = Car.count
visit new_car_path
fill_in 'Color', with: car.color
select car.year, from: 'Year'
fill_in 'Mileage', with: car.mileage
fill_in 'Description', with: car.description
select car_manufacturer.name, from: 'Owner'
click_on 'Create Car'
expect(page).to have_content('Car Submitted')
expect(Car.count).to eql(car_count + 1)
end

Thank you for the help. I'm just unsure why this would happen and don't know what I should try to fix it.

Ok, so I think I found the answer. Before I didn't have the associations in my model file. I have since added them below:

require 'spec_helper'

describe Car do
  it { should validate_presence_of(:color) }
  it { should validate_presence_of(:year) }
  it { should validate_presence_of(:mileage) }
  it { should ensure_inclusion_of(:year).in_array(Car::YEARS) }
  it { should_not have_valid(:year).when('','nineteenninetynine',1979) }
  it { should_not have_valid(:mileage).when('3300 miles') }
  it { should belong_to(:car_manufacturer) }
end

require 'spec_helper'

describe CarManufacturer do
  it { should validate_presence_of(:name) }
  it { should validate_presence_of(:country) }
  it { should_not have_valid(:name).when('',nil) }
  it { should_not have_valid(:country).when('',nil) }
  it { should have_many(:cars) }
end

My new question is, does Factory Girl depend on the model validations? I was under the impression that it didn't. Can someone clarify. I tried the github documentation but I don't remember that it explicitly said so. Thx.

Answer 1

Can you verify that you've migrated the test database? Often, when an accessor isn't working correctly (in this example, car_manufacturer=), it's either spelled incorrectly or the test database hasn't been migrated correctly (since AR will inflect on the table).