Attachment Fu Fixtures

This plugin enables models that implement attachment_fu to also use fixtures. It processes and stores the attachment file as if it had being uploaded. Useful if you use fixtures in your tests/specs and want to test with real attachments, but especially useful for, and intended to be used as, seed data fixtures.

Fixtures are simple and convenient for seed/sample/dev data; they have built-in tasks (rake db:fixtures:load) and are automatically generated with scaffolds.

Great for preview and staging environments where you want content and attachments to be available. Images, for example, can help a fair deal with presentation (think about your client viewing how the site is evolving) and to present a more realistic experience. Perfect for production seed data that requires attachments.

Also useful in development, for when you use fixtures to populate the interface. Essential for front-end development, and to get a quick glance at the interface.

Features

Parses and stores attachment files, just like any upload would
Seamless integration with existing fixtures
Extremely simple to use
Keeps all model relationships, just like regular fixtures

Dependencies

Rick Olson’s attachment_fu plugin
Rspec and SQLite if you want to run the specs
Rails, etc.

Examples

To use, all you have to do is add a fixture for the attachment with an ‘attachment_file’ field, pointing to your attachment file. That’s it!

= fixtures/images.yml beach: title: kho phi phi beach attachment_file: test/images/maya.png

All other fields required by attachment_fu will be automatically filled in. If explicitly specified in the fixture though, they take precedence.

belongs_to associations are specified just like in normal fixtures. For example, for an image that belongs to a user:

= fixtures/images.yml harbour: title: victoria harbour attachment_file: test/images/harbour.png user: mynyml

To load the fixture data, cd to RAILS_ROOT and call

rake db:fixtures:load      #for test/fixtures
rake spec:db:fixtures:load #for spec/fixtures

TIP: If you also use fixtures for tests/specs, I recommend you create a separate set of fixtures to use as seed data. You can store them in another directory (e.g. db/dev_data, db/fixtures, or even categorize them per environment) and create a custom rake task to load them (you can copy-paste rails’s from railties/lib/tasks/databases.rake and simply change the path).

The examples above use rails 2.0 style fixtures. If you’re a bit confused by how fixtures are written here (e.g. because they don’t have ids, etc.), check out http://railscasts.com/episodes/81

Installation

If you’re using edge rails from the github repository, you can install with the built in plugin installation command

./script/plugin install git://github.com/mynyml/attachment_fu_fixtures.git

Otherwise you can install manually with just a few steps

o download the tarball at http://github.com/mynyml/attachment_fu_fixtures/tarball/master
  into your vendor/plugins directory
o extract it
o rename the extracted directory to attachment_fu_fixtures
o delete the file you downloaded (you won't need it anymore)

TIP: If you’re on linux, the terminal commands for the above steps are:

from witin your vendor/plugins directory:

wget http://github.com/mynyml/attachment_fu_fixtures/tarball/master;
tar zxvf mynyml-attachment_fu_fixtures-.tar.gz;
mv mynyml-attachment_fu_fixtures-/ attachment_fu_fixtures;
rm mynyml-attachment_fu_fixtures-*.tar.gz

Tests

Tested with:

attachment_fu (r3179 and commit 3836c313d6)
rails (2.0.2 r9237 and 2.0.2 gem)
rspec (1.1.4)

To run specs:

make sure rspec is installed
make sure attachment_fu is installed
make sure sqlite is installed
run from RAILS_ROOT with rake spec:plugins

Contributions

- Thanks to Patrick Crosby for submitting a patch for the model_class bug - Thanks to Jeff Webb for patching HABTM and STI handling

Contact

If you have suggestions, comments, a patch, a git pull request, rants, doc fixes/improvements, etc., feel free to contact me: mynyml at gmail, irc.freenode.net #rubyonrails

And if you find this plugin useful… I especially appreciate emails mentioning what sites/projects it’s been used with

Happy Hacking!