In a previous post, I posted a monkey patch to enhance the behavior of fixtures. I converted it into a plugin format for convenience and testing purposes. I am still aiming to submit it as a patch to Rails 2.0. I’d appreciate any feedback!

svn export --username=public svn://internautdesign.com/public/plugins/friendly_fixtures vendor/plugins/friendly_fixtures

UPDATE: now available at github: http://github.com/dfl/friendly_fixtures/tree/master

from the README:

FriendlyFixtures

This plugin is a simple extension to add some cool features to the fixtures macro in Test::Unit. It is intended for Rails 2.0, but works with 1.2.3 as well.

• load dependent models, which are found by object introspection on a model’s ActiveRecord associations.
• assert that all the loaded fixtures are valid. This can be very helpful in finding bugs.

Example Usage:

class SomeTest < Test::Unit::TestCase
  fixtures :user, :dependencies => true, :validate => true
end