Amit Solanki

Few days back, I need to write rspec tests for one of my ongoing projects. I had a self referential association like this:

class User
  has_and_belongs_to_many :friends,
                        :class_name               => "User",
                        :join_table               => "friends_users",
                        :association_foreign_key  => "friend_id",
                        :foreign_key              => "user_id"
end

I had friends_users.yml file in my fixtures. Since I did not have any intermediate model, I could not use fixtures defined in users.yml in friends_users.yml. I was able to find a way out within Fixtures class itself. Here is the snippet from friends_users.yml

jack_and_jill:
  user_id: <%= Fixtures.identify('Jack') %>
  friend_id: <%= Fixtures.identify('Jill') %>

Here is snippet from users.yml:

Jack:
  name: Jack Brown
Jill:
  name: Jill Green

For further details, refer to rails api documentation here