In most of our applications, users have their first and last name stored in separate columns. However, specifying them separately quickly gets annoying, especially when proxying them from cucumber_factory Show archive.org snapshot :

Given there is a user with the first name "Dominik" and the last name "Schöler"

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Wouldn't it be nice if you could just say:

Given there is a user with the name "Dominik Schöler"

and have FactoryGirl assign first and last name automatically? The code below achieves that!

Solution

factory :user do
  transient do
    name nil
  end

  sequence(:first_name) { |i| "First name #{i}" }
  sequence(:last_name) { |i| "Last name #{i}" }

  after(:build) do |instance, evaluator|
    if evaluator.name
      instance.first_name, instance.last_name = evaluator.name.split(' ')
    end
  end
end

Explanation: transient attributes behave like attributes, except that they aren't assigned to the record. By defining the transient name, we have a bucket to put the name in. The sequences just generate first and last name, they are a basic feature.
after(:build) we try whether the factory was passed a name value. If so, we assign first and last (actually, "second") name.