Rails testing using Rspec and FactoryBot

factory :job_application will guess that you want to make an object of the class JobApplication. To make a Hash you need to make it explicit. See Defining Factories.

factory :job_application, class: Hash

Because Hash.new does not take a bunch of key/value pairs, you need to override the default initialization behavior. I've found the simplest thing to do is to return the attributes of the factory. See Custom Construction.

Those use symbol keys, you want string keys, so we use deep_stringify_keys. This also takes care of cloning attributes just in case.

factory :job_application, class: Hash do
  initialize_with do
    attributes.deep_stringify_keys
  end
end

Now you can add attributes in the normal way.

factory :job_application, class: Hash do
  email { "[email protected]" }

  initialize_with do
    attributes.deep_stringify_keys
  end
end

Because there is no save method, you can only build these Hash factories.

# Yes
jorb = FactoryBot.build(:job_application)

# No
jorb = FactoryBot.create(:job_application)

I find myself doing this a lot, so I've built a string_hash factory to inherit from.

factory :string_hash, class: Hash do
  initialize_with do
    attributes.deep_stringify_keys
  end
end

factory :job_application, parent: :string_hash do
  email { "[email protected]" }
end

If you want nested hashes, I suggest you make additional factories and associate them together. This allows you to easily change the values in the nested hashes.

Associations default to using create, we need to explicitly build our associations. See Associations.

factory :address, parent: :string_hash do
  street { "Ahead St." }
  postal_code { "12345" }
end

factory :job_application, parent: :string_hash do
  association :address, strategy: :build

  email { "[email protected]" }
  name { "Coach Z" }
end

build(:job_application,
  address: build(:address, street: "Sesame St.")
)

Do ask yourself whether it makes sense to define these as models. This makes them work with normal factories and features like validation and you can add methods and all that good stuff.

Since this is data you receive in a controller it might benefit from having validations and methods. See ActiveModel Form Objects by ThoughtBot.

class JobApplication
  include ActiveModel::Model
  include ActiveModel::Validations

  attr_accessor :email, :name, :address

  validates :name, :email, presence: true
end

class Address
  include ActiveModel::Model

  attr_accessor :street, :postal_code
end

factory :address do
  street { "Ahead St." }
  postal_code { "12345" }
end

factory :job_application do
  # Can't save a Model either.
  association :address, strategy: :build

  email { "[email protected]" }
  name { "Coach Z" }
end