Question

I have a class that I am unit testing into with DUnit. It has a number of methods some public methods and private methods.

type   TAuth = class(TDataModule)   private     procedure PrivateMethod;   public     procedure PublicMethod;   end; 

In order to write a unit test for this class I have to make all the methods public.

Is there a different way to declare the private methods so that I can still test them but they are not public?

Answer 1

You don’t need to make them public. Protected will do. Then you can subtype the class for unit testing and surface the protected methods. Example:

type   TAuth = class(TDataModule)   protected     procedure MethodIWantToUnitTest;   public     procedure PublicMethod;   end; 

Now you can subtype it for your unit test:

interface  uses   TestFramework, Classes, AuthDM;  type   // Test methods for class TAuthDM   TestAuthDM = class(TTestCase)      // stuff   end;    TAuthDMTester = class(TAuthDM)   public     procedure MethodIWantToUnitTestMadePublic;   end;  implementation  procedure TAuthDMTester.MethodIWantToUnitTestMadePublic; begin   MethodIWantToUnitTest; end; 

However, if the methods you want to unit test are doing things so intimately with the data module that it is not safe to have them anything but private, then you should really consider refactoring the methods in order to segregate the code which needs to be unit tested and the code which accesses the innards of the data module.