I really like FactoryMuffin 3.0. In my opinion a lot of good design decisions were made for the upcoming version.

What's a show stopper for me at the moment though is very limited compatibility with Faker through the facade. Especially bothering at the current point is one thing. If I'm using Faker directly I can concatenate generated string. So this would work

$fm->define('Model')->setDefinitions(array(
    'someValue' => $faker->firstName() . ' ' . $faker->randomNumber()
));

Using the facade I get an exception, because the returned closure can not be casted to a string.

$fm->define('Model')->setDefinitions(array(
    'someValue' => Faker::firstName() . ' ' . Faker::randomNumber()
));

That's why I'm wondering, why is a closure returned in Faker.php in line 121 (format() method). Why is the result not directly returned like so:

/**
     * Wrap a faker format in a closure.
     *
     * @param string $formatter The formatter.
     * @param array  $arguments The arguments.
     *
     * @return \Closure
     */
    public function format($formatter, array $arguments = [])
    {
        return $this->getGenerator()->format( $formatter, $arguments );
    }

This would already resolve the issue but I guess there would be other drawbacks?

when I require the package with composer I figure out that the faker dependency still on 1.4, how I can get 1.5? because I need the Arabic support from faker 1.5 to to generate data!!

unique() is pretty easy to understand: a global repository of already-generated data, guaranteed not to be repeated. In our application, we have ~400 factories, and about 1k instances of unique() corresponding to database constraint and about 800 unit tests. We easily surpass the 10k limit and even when upping to 100k. It would be immensely helpful to be able to pass a key: unique('table.column')->whatever(). In addition, would be good to have a clear() method when we refresh the database.

protected function _after()
{
    Faker::unique()->clear();
}

If agreed, I can spin up a PR.

@philsturgeon Is there any chance you could enable travis, scrutinizer, and add the packagist hook.

Are there any particular advantages over using factory-muffin-faker over the faker package it wraps around?

I would be nice if we could have some DocBlocks like @Property or @method, along the line of https://github.com/fzaninotto/Faker/blob/master/src/Faker/Generator.php#L6-L174

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