Tag Archives: Mocking

Getting started with Caricature and IronRuby

Posted by on May 21, 2009 2 comments

IronRuby 0.5 was released yesterday. You can download it on codeplex. This post will explain how you setup your ironruby environment to use it for testing existing CLR based assemblies.  We’ll touch installing gems using rake and most importantly writing a test for a CLR based class where we’ll mock out the dependencies.

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Caricature ready for beta

Posted by on May 19, 2009 No comments

The last couple of days I’ve been getting Caricature to a more releasable state. The code got a thorough cleanup and refactor. Caricature now knows how to be a full mocking framework for Ruby classes and CLR classes that only interact with ruby objects. When I apply the 80/20 rule to caricature it’s definitely beta worthy.

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IronRuby just got a mocking framework – kind of

Posted by on May 14, 2009 No comments

As I mentioned in a previous post.  I started working on a small mocking framework. It has now progressed far enough to handle the most common mocking tasks.

Below I pasted the output of the integration tests for CLR interop.

when isolating CLR interfaces
- should work without expectations
- should work with an expectation with any arguments
- should work with an expectation getting different method call result
- should work for an assertion on a specific argument

when isolating CLR classes
- should work without expectations
- should work with an expectation for any arguments
- should work with an assertion for specific arguments
- should fail for an assertion with wrong arguments

when isolating CLR instances
- should work without expectations
- should work with an expectation for any arguments
- should fail for an assertion for specific arguments
- should allow to delegate the method call to the real instance (partial mock)

you will need bacon installed to run the specs. you should issue the command igem install bacon for that.

you can then install the caricature gem in ironruby by issueing

igem install caricature

To use it there are some examples in the file spec/integration_spec.rb 


require 'rubygems'
require 'bacon'
require 'caricature'

ninja.when_told_to(:survive_attack_with).return(5) 

weapon.attack(ninja).should.equal 5 

ninja.was_told_to?(:survive_attack_with).with(:any).should.be.successful

There is a gotcha though, when you use it in a CLR class you’re bound to CLR rules and it only overrides the methods that are marked as virtual. We also can’t isolate static or sealed types at the moment.

I took the approach of doing away with the terminology of mocking and subbing and instead chose the much clearer Isolation. By default any method returns null or the default value of a value type. You can tell an isolation to return a specific value or raise an error etc.  Later on you can then assert if the method was actually called. 

This fits in better with the way you probably structure your tests.

I hope you like it.

You can find the source in my github account.

http://github.com/casualjim/caricature

Mocking for IronRuby

Posted by on May 3, 2009 2 comments

As you may or may not know I’m in the process of building IronRubyMvc. At one point I did write a bunch of tests in for the code I had at that point. However that test code was written in C# with xunit and moq.  I wasn’t too happy about that so I deferred writing tests to a later date when I could use a Ruby library to write them.

That time has come, I can use bacon and it’s acceptable performance wise now, not stellar but workable. So when I started to port some of my previously written tests to bacon I ran into a road block. Mocking isn’t as straightforward as my optimistic self was expecting. This lead me to think about what exactly does a mocking framework do?

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