One of the things I really like about modern Laravel projects, are the new model factories introduced in Laravel 8.
When writing complex tests, you often need quite a lot of setup, and features like factories, and especially factory sequences make that setup significantly easier to do. Take a look at this example:
$blogPosts = BlogPost::factory()
->count(3)
->published()
->sequence(
[‘title’ => ‘Parallel php’],
[‘title’ => ‘Fibers’],
[‘title’ => ‘Thoughts on event sourcing’],
)
->create();
This factory call will make three blog posts. Each post will have a published state, but also a different title, thanks to that sequence method.
Did you know that you even can use array destructuring to immediately get all three blogposts in separate variables?
[$a, $b, $c] = BlogPost::factory()
->count(3)
->published()
->sequence(
[‘title’ => ‘Parallel php’],
[‘title’ => ‘Fibers’],
[‘title’ => ‘Thoughts on event sourcing’],
)
->create();
Pretty neat! These model factories are a great addition to Laravel. Oh and, if you were wondering, the Laravel Idea plugin has full autocomplete support for them in PhpStorm as well!