Sometimes in your development environment, you might have created a valid active record object which you want to use as a fixture data in your test, so you don’t want to waste your time from building fixture manually.

To do this, you just need to open your Rails console and fetch that active record object:

task = Task.last

# =>
# #<Task:0x00007fbf11919f60> {
#                :id => 28,
#           :subject => "Arrange Photographs",
#    :assigned_to_id => 3,
#       :due_date_at => Sat, 17 Mar 2018 01:00:20 EDT -04:00,
#         :completed => true,
#     :taskable_type => "Lead",
#       :taskable_id => 5,
#           :user_id => 3,
#        :created_at => Wed, 14 Mar 2018 01:00:20 EDT -04:00,
#        :updated_at => Mon, 19 Mar 2018 01:00:20 EDT -04:00,
#      :completed_at => Sun, 18 Mar 2018 01:00:20 EDT -04:00,
#   :type_associated => nil,
#   :completed_by_id => 3,
#    :is_next_action => nil
# }

Then convert that object into fixture data like this,

puts task.attributes.to_yaml

# =>
# id: 28
# subject: Arrange Photographs
# assigned_to_id: 3
# due_date_at: !ruby/object:ActiveSupport::TimeWithZone
#   utc: 2018-03-17 05:00:20.233297000 Z
#   zone: &1 !ruby/object:ActiveSupport::TimeZone
#     name: America/New_York
#   time: 2018-03-17 01:00:20.233297000 Z
# completed: true
# taskable_type: Lead
# taskable_id: 5
# user_id: 3
# created_at: !ruby/object:ActiveSupport::TimeWithZone
#   utc: 2018-03-14 05:00:20.233605000 Z
#   zone: *1
#   time: 2018-03-14 01:00:20.233605000 Z
# updated_at: !ruby/object:ActiveSupport::TimeWithZone
#   utc: 2018-03-19 05:00:20.245432000 Z
#   zone: *1
#   time: 2018-03-19 01:00:20.245432000 Z
# completed_at: !ruby/object:ActiveSupport::TimeWithZone
#   utc: 2018-03-18 05:00:20.233475000 Z
#   zone: *1
#   time: 2018-03-18 01:00:20.233475000 Z
# type_associated:
# completed_by_id: 3
# is_next_action: false
# nil

Then copy this data, paste in your fixture file, and give a proper name to the fixture. Handle primary keys, foreign keys, date columns and remove additional records as per your requirement.

Also, if you want to select specific attributes from the object, then use it like this,

puts task.attributes.slice("subject", "completed").to_yaml

# =>
# subject: Arrange Photographs
# completed: true
# nil

I find this helpful when we create significant active record objects into the database from parsing our user’s email data and generating fixtures manually for them in tests is cumbersome.

Simple but useful :rocket: