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This is working but it feels sloppy to me. I'm wondering if it is a code smell or if there is a better way to be accomplishing this result. Basic question is how to stub some arbitrary object in ruby.

I'm testing an edge case- that the final value of a parsing helper method correctly formats the result of a google analytics query (thus the odd assert statement) the incoming data is a google analytics object whose data is inside- essentially we have to call result.data["rows"]. The whole purpose of the struct here is to give my method's internals the ability to send that #data message. The test passes/fails appropriately but like I said, i'm wondering if this was the best way to go about it, for example getting my data out of the GA result object before sending it to be parsed.

my approach from the test- effectively it calls parse_monthly_chart_data(@ga_result)

def test_parse_monthly_chart_data_with_good_values
  typical_data = {"rows" => [["0000", "194346"]...more arrays...]}
  typical_vals = typical_data["rows"].to_h.values.map(&:to_i)
  expected_result = typical_vals[-30..-1].inject(&:+)

  Struct.new("GaResult") {def data; end }
  @ga_result = Struct::GaResult.new
  @ga_result.stub :data, typical_data do
      assert_equal(ga.send(:parse_monthly_chart_data, @ga_result).flatten.last, expected_result)
  end

end

Edit: I've solved for part of this issue by replacing stub with mocha's implementation. I'm still wondering if this is a code smell.

erikdstock
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1 Answers1

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Not at all. I use this type of thing all the time. What you're using is called stubbing and using a Struct to accomplish this is no different than using a testing framework's implementation of a stub.

For further reading on mocks, stubbing, faking, etc. see this SO Question.

Community
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Gavin Miller
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  • Thanks. I guess I was wondering because I was having to create this entire fake object so it would have a single method 'data' that I could stub. I did like mocha's implementation which behaves much more like a javascript object- no need to differentiate between `obj.data` and `obj.data['rows']` when i define my data structure. THANKS! – erikdstock Oct 22 '15 at 16:27