Mocking Ruby

No... not like it has been recently.

The question came up of whether I had been using mock objects before and how I would do it in Ruby. Having read recently Pragmatic Unit Testing, I had a few ideas on how to proceed. However, the rules change when you are using Ruby instead of Java.

Here is the test code I answered my questions with:

puts "before: #{Time.now}"

class Time
  def self.now
    'mock answer'
  end
end

puts "after:  #{Time.now}"

Outputs:

before: Thu Sep 14 13:02:46 EDT 2006
after:  mock answer

No wrapper class. No factories.

For the sake of full disclosure:

• You might want to save a pointer to the old method.


• The way you would do that is a little cumbersome for static methods . But it's very clean otherwise.