Question

I am developing an AS3 application which uses a Singleton class to store Metrics in Arrays. It’s a Singleton because I only ever want one instance of this class to be created and it needs to be created from any part of the app.

The difficulty comes when I want to unit test this class. I thought adding public getters and setters would enable me to unit test this properly and would be useful for my app. I have read that changing to a Factory pattern will enable unit testing or using Inversion of control. This would of course make it more flexible too. I would like to know of people’s thoughts on this matter as there are SO many conflicting opinions on this!

Thanks

Chris

Answer 1

If you’re using an IoC framework, then make your consumers require an instance of the service in their constructor, and configure the IoC framework to only build one instance and keep handing it out to all requests in the entire application. This is the default behavior of Castle Windsor in my experience.

For unit testing you can use a Mock object in place of the real object.