Pydantic-Factories
This library offers powerful mock data generation capabilities for pydantic based models. It can also be used with other libraries that use pydantic as a foundation, for example SQLModel, Beanie and ormar.
Features
-
✅ supports both built-in and pydantic types -
✅ supports pydantic field constraints -
✅ supports complex field types -
✅ supports custom model fields
Why This Library?
-
💯 powerful -
💯 extensible -
💯 simple -
💯 rigorously tested
Installation
Using your package manager of choice:
pip install pydantic-factories
OR
poetry add --dev pydantic-factories
OR
pipenv install --dev pydantic-factories
pydantic-factories has very few dependencies aside from pydantic - typing-extensions which is used for typing support in older versions of python, as well as faker and exrex, both of which are used for generating mock data.
Usage
from datetime import date, datetime
from typing import List, Union
from pydantic import BaseModel, UUID4
from pydantic_factories import ModelFactory
class Person(BaseModel):
id: UUID4
name: str
hobbies: List[str]
age: Union[float, int]
birthday: Union[datetime, date]
class PersonFactory(ModelFactory):
__model__ = Person
result = PersonFactory.build()
That's it - with almost no work, we are able to create a mock data object fitting the Person
class model definition.
This is possible because of the typing information available on the pydantic model and model-fields, which are used as a source of truth for data generation.
The factory parses the information stored in the pydantic model and generates a dictionary of kwargs that are passed to the Person
class' init method.
Build Methods
The ModelFactory
class exposes two build methods:
.build(**kwargs)
- builds a single instance of the factory's model.batch(size: int, **kwargs)
- build a list of size n instances
result = PersonFactory.build() # a single Person instance
result = PersonFactory.batch(size=5) # list[Person, Person, Person, Person, Person]
Any kwargs
you pass to .build
, .batch
or any of the persistence methods, will take precedence over whatever defaults are defined on the factory class itself.
Nested Models and Complex types
The automatic generation of mock data works for all types supported by pydantic, as well as nested classes that derive from BaseModel
(including for 3rd party libraries) and complex types. Let's look at another example:
from datetime import date, datetime
from enum import Enum
from pydantic import BaseModel, UUID4
from typing import Any, Dict, List, Union
from pydantic_factories import ModelFactory
class Species(str, Enum):
CAT = "Cat"
DOG = "Dog"
PIG = "Pig"
MONKEY = "Monkey"
class Pet(BaseModel):
name: str
sound: str
species: Species
class Person(BaseModel):
id: UUID4
name: str
hobbies: List[str]
age: Union[float, int]
birthday: Union[datetime, date]
pets: List[Pet]
assets: List[Dict[str, Dict[str, Any]]]
class PersonFactory(ModelFactory):
__model__ = Person
result = PersonFactory.build()
This example will also work out of the box although no factory was defined for the Pet class, that's not a problem - a factory will be dynamically generated for it on the fly.
The complex typing under the assets
attribute is a bit more tricky, but the factory will generate a python object fitting this signature, therefore passing validation.
Please note: the one thing factories cannot handle is self referencing models, because this can lead to recursion errors. In this case you will need to handle the particular field by setting defaults for it.
Factory Configuration
Configuration of ModelFactory
is done using class variables:
-
__model__: a required variable specifying the model for the factory. It accepts any class that extends _ pydantic's_
BaseModel
including classes from other libraries. If this variable is not set, aConfigurationException
will be raised. -
__faker__: an optional variable specifying a user configured instance of faker. If this variable is not set, the factory will default to using vanilla
faker
. -
__sync_persistence__: an optional variable specifying the handler for synchronously persisting data. If this is variable is not set, the
.create_sync
and.create_batch_sync
methods of the factory cannot be used. See: persistence methods -
__async_persistence__: an optional variable specifying the handler for asynchronously persisting data. If this is variable is not set, the
.create_async
and.create_batch_async
methods of the factory cannot be used. See: persistence methods
from faker import Faker
from pydantic_factories import ModelFactory
from app.models import Person
from .persistence import AsyncPersistenceHandler, SyncPersistenceHandler
Faker.seed(5)
my_faker = Faker("en-EN")
class PersonFactory(ModelFactory):
__model__ = Person
__faker__ = my_faker
__sync_persistence__ = SyncPersistenceHandler
__async_persistence__ = AsyncPersistenceHandler
...
Defining Factory Attributes
The factory api is designed to be as semantic and simple as possible, lets look at several examples that assume we have the following models:
from datetime import date, datetime
from enum import Enum
from pydantic import BaseModel, UUID4
from typing import Any, Dict, List, Union
from pydantic_factories import ModelFactory
class Species(str, Enum):
CAT = "Cat"
DOG = "Dog"
class Pet(BaseModel):
name: str
species: Species
class Person(BaseModel):
id: UUID4
name: str
hobbies: List[str]
age: Union[float, int]
birthday: Union[datetime, date]
pets: List[Pet]
assets: List[Dict[str, Dict[str, Any]]]
One way of defining defaults is to use hardcoded values:
pet = Pet(name="Roxy", sound="woof woof", species=Species.DOG)
class PersonFactory(ModelFactory):
__model__ = Person
pets = [pet]
In this case when we call PersonFactory.build()
the result will be randomly generated, except the pets list, which will be the hardcoded default we defined.
Use (field)
This though is often not desirable. We could instead, define a factory for Pet
where we restrict the choices to a range we like. For example:
from enum import Enum
from pydantic_factories.fields import Use
from random import choice
class Species(str, Enum):
CAT = "Cat"
DOG = "Dog"
class PetFactory(ModelFactory):
__model__ = Pet
name = Use(choice, ["Ralph", "Roxy"])
species = Use(choice, list(Species))
class PersonFactory(ModelFactory):
__model__ = Person
pets = Use(PetFactory.batch, size=2)
The signature for use is: cb: Callable, *args, **defaults
, it can receive any sync callable. In the above example, we used the choice
function from the standard library's random
package, and the batch method of PetFactory
.
You do not need to use the Use
field, you can place callables (including classes) as values for a factory's attribute directly, and these will be invoked at build-time. Thus, you could for example re-write the above PetFactory
like so:
class PetFactory(ModelFactory):
__model__ = Pet
name = lambda: choice(["Ralph", "Roxy"])
species = lambda: choice(list(Species))
Use
is merely a semantic abstraction that makes the factory cleaner and simpler to understand.
Ignore (field)
Ignore
is another field exported by this library, and its used - as its name implies - to designate a given attribute as ignored:
from odmantic import EmbeddedModel, Model
from pydantic_factories.fields import Ignore
T = TypeVar("T", Model, EmbeddedModel)
class OdmanticModelFactory(ModelFactory[T]):
id = Ignore()
The above example is basically the extension included in pydantic-factories
for the library odmantic, which is a pydantic based mongo ODM.
For odmantic models, the id
attribute should not be set by the factory, but rather handled by the odmantic logic itself. Thus the id
field is marked as ignored.
When you ignore an attribute using Ignore
, it will be completely ignored by the factory - that is, it will not be set as a kwarg passed to pydantic at all.
Require (field)
The Require
field in turn specifies that a particular attribute is a required kwarg. That is, if a kwarg with a value for this particular attribute is not passed when calling factory.build()
, a MissingBuildKwargError
will be raised.
What is the use case for this? For example, lets say we have a document called Article
which we store in some DB and is represented using a non-pydantic model, say, an elastic-dsl
document. We then need to store in our pydantic object a reference to an id for this article. This value should not be some mock value, but must rather be an actual id passed to the factory. Thus, we can define this attribute as required:
from pydantic import BaseModel
from pydantic_factories import ModelFactory, Require
from uuid import UUID
class ArticleProxy(BaseModel):
article_id: UUID
...
class ArticleProxyFactory(ModelFactory):
__model__ = ArticleProxy
article_id = Require()
If we call factory.build()
without passing a value for article_id, an error will be raised.
Persistence
ModelFactory
has four persistence methods:
.create_sync(**kwargs)
- builds and persists a single instance of the factory's model synchronously.create_batch_sync(size: int, **kwargs)
- builds and persists a list of size n instances synchronously.create_async(**kwargs)
- builds and persists a single instance of the factory's model asynchronously.create_batch_async(size: int, **kwargs)
- builds and persists a list of size n instances asynchronously
To use these methods, you must first specify a sync and/or async persistence handlers for the factory:
# persistence.py
from typing import TypeVar, List
from pydantic import BaseModel
from pydantic_factories import SyncPersistenceProtocol
T = TypeVar("T", bound=BaseModel)
class SyncPersistenceHandler(SyncPersistenceProtocol[T]):
def save(self, data: T) -> T:
... # do stuff
def save_many(self, data: List[T]) -> List[T]:
... # do stuff
class AsyncPersistenceHandler(AsyncPersistenceProtocol[T]):
async def save(self, data: T) -> T:
... # do stuff
async def save_many(self, data: List[T]) -> List[T]:
... # do stuff
You can then specify one or both of these handlers in your factory:
from pydantic_factories import ModelFactory
from app.models import Person
from .persistence import AsyncPersistenceHandler, SyncPersistenceHandler
class PersonFactory(ModelFactory):
__model__ = Person
__sync_persistence__ = SyncPersistenceHandler
__async_persistence__ = AsyncPersistenceHandler
Or create your own base factory and reuse it in your various factories:
from pydantic_factories import ModelFactory
from app.models import Person
from .persistence import AsyncPersistenceHandler, SyncPersistenceHandler
class BaseModelFactory(ModelFactory):
__sync_persistence__ = SyncPersistenceHandler
__async_persistence__ = AsyncPersistenceHandler
class PersonFactory(BaseModelFactory):
__model__ = Person
With the persistence handlers in place, you can now use all persistence methods. Please note - you do not need to define any or both persistence handlers. If you will only use sync or async persistence, you only need to define the respective handler to use these methods.
Extensions and Third Party Libraries
Any class that is derived from pydantic's BaseModel
can be used as the __model__
of a factory. For most 3rd party libraries, e.g. SQLModel or Ormar, this library will work as is out of the box.
Currently, this library also includes extensions for two ODM libraries - odmatic and Beanie.
Odmatic
This extension includes a class called OdmanticModelFactory
and it can be imported from pydantic_factory.extensions
. This class is meant to be used with the Model
and EmbeddedModel
classes exported by the library, but it will also work with regular instances of pydantic's BaseModel
.
Beanie
This extension includes a class called BeanieDocumentFactory
as well as an BeaniePersistenceHandler
. Both of these can be imported from pydantic_factory.extensions
. The BeanieDocumentFactory
is meant to be used with the Beanie Document
class and it includes async persistence build in.
Contributing
This library is open to contributions - in fact we welcome it. Please see the contribution guide!