unit testing active resource - mock or connect?

rubyonrails-core
1

Hi all - there's a patch I need to apply from a ticket:

http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/8798

The ticket appears to be stalled on the lack of a test case. I figured I'd just whip one up, but because it's an Active Resource thing, and the test case would need to do ModelName.find(:all), I'd need to either mock the network connection or set one up.

In this case setting up a mock seems kind of weak, but setting up the net con seems kind of overbearing.

What's recommended here?

Giles

2

The active resource unit tests use a mock request object for testing.

3

> > Hi all - there's a patch I need to apply from a ticket: > > http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/8798 > > The ticket appears to be stalled on the lack of a test case.

As original submittor, the stall has been my fault :-(. I"ve been heads down on a pretty large project that happens to be using ARes (with my patch) successfully -- but thanks for taking this on.

> I figured > I'd just whip one up, but because it's an Active Resource thing, and > the test case would need to do ModelName.find(:all), I'd need to > either mock the network connection or set one up. > > In this case setting up a mock seems kind of weak, but setting up the > net con seems kind of overbearing. > > What's recommended here?

The active resource unit tests use a mock request object for testing.

One thing that makes me a little uncomfortable with the ARes unit tests is that the ones that consume XML do not start from raw XML input ... they start from a Ruby Hash that is converted into XML, and therefore might *not* reflect the kind of data you might really get across the wire.

Maybe that is really more appropriate for higher level testing -- but the bug that 8798 reports was not caught by the current tests ... and indeed did not bite me until I actually tried to parse XML passed across the network (from a Rails app using to_xml to serialize ActiveRecord models, which is subtly different than to_xml on a Hash).

Craig McClanahan

4

Maybe that is really more appropriate for higher level testing -- but the bug that 8798 reports was not caught by the current tests ... and indeed did not bite me until I actually tried to parse XML passed across the network (from a Rails app using to_xml to serialize ActiveRecord models, which is subtly different than to_xml on a Hash).

If there are cases where the current hash-based approaches are causing problems, then we should definitely switch at least *some* of the unit tests to use proper xml. If someone whips up a patch for that I'd happily take a look.