I’ve been using Factory Boy in all of my tests for a while, but I hadn’t upgraded the package since setting up my development machine in December of last year. This meant I have been happily chugging along with v1.20.
Today I started the task of upgrading my applications to Django v1.5, so I ran pip install --upgrade on my requirements file. Django moved up to v1.5 just fine, but Factory Boy also jumped up to v2.11. I hadn’t noticed that some new features and several deprecations were added in v1.3, and many changes happened for v2.0.
DjangoModelFactory
The first odd behavior I noticed was that the model instances created by the factories weren’t being saved, and I also had trouble adding data to ManyToMany relationships even after I explicitly saved them. Turns out there was a major change to the Factory class. Rather than use that generic class, we are now being directed to use DjangoModelFactory.
The error I was seeing was a recursion problem, so it took a while to track down.
Sequence
Next, all of my Sequence calls were failing – telling me that I couldn’t use a string operation on a type of ‘int’. In this case the problem was that the default data type for a sequence was changed to ‘int’. Since ‘str’ was the former default (although not necessarily documented), my solution was to declare the type as ‘str’.
name = factory.Sequence(lambda n: 'Location ' + n, str)
I’m a big fan of this package for tests, and I am glad that it is a very active project. Read through the change log for more info on these and many other updates.
I promise to do a better job of keeping up with the changes.