Create factory extending/overriding an existing factory's attributes

[vlakoff]

At first glance, I tried to create a factory for admin users like so:

$factory('App\User', [
    'name' => $faker->userName,
    'password' => $faker->password,
]);

$factory('App\User', 'admin_user', [
    'admin' => 1,
]);

… But this doesn't work. All the attributes have to be defined again. This was a bit suprising, mainly because Factory::build('App\User', ['admin' => 1]) was doing the job. But I understand, the current behaviour is perfectly fine, short names aren't at all about extending.

So, I tried this:

$factory('App\User', 'admin_user', Factory::attributesFor('App\User', [
    'admin' => 1,
]));

... But this doesn't work, because the App\User factory isn't available yet.

So far, I have to do this:

$attributes = [
    'name' => $faker->userName,
    'password' => $faker->password,
];

$factory('App\User', $attributes);

$attributes['admin' => 1];

$factory('App\User', 'admin_user', $attributes);

Do you think this could this be improved ? I was thinking of a syntax like so:

$factory('extends:<class-or-shortname>', 'admin_user', [
    'admin' => 1,
]);

[vlakoff]

The "Multiple Factory Types" section in documentation of the Laravel wrapper might be of interest.

Basically, I think the caveat in TestDummy is that the definitions are more complicated to retrieve.