Question

I have the following test case in my iOS application :

-(void) testTwoDefaultUsersExist
{
NSString * expected;
NSString * actual;

expected = @"John Smith";
actual = [[[userService getAllUsers]objectAtIndex:0] fullName];
STAssertEqualObjects(expected, actual, @"Not equal");
expected = @"Dave Brown";
actual = [[[userService getAllUsers]objectAtIndex:1] fullName];
STAssertEqualObjects(expected, actual, @"Not equal");
}

The above just checks that my call to [userService getAllUsers] returns 2 User objects, one with a name of John Smith, the other with Dave Brown. This appears to work fine for this scenario, but I have other cases where that ordering may change, so John may be placed in index 1 rather than 0

Question : How can I assert that the NSMutableArray, being returned from the call to [userService getAllUsers] contains those 2 objects, regardless of ordering?

Answer 1

Can you not simply use the NSArray method -containsObject:? An NSMutableArray is still an NSArray, so you can do:

NSArray * expected = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:@"John Smith", @"Dave Brown", nil];
NSArray * actual = [[userService getAllUsers] valueForKey:@"fullName"];
for(NSString * name in expected) {
    STAssertTrue([actual containsObject:name], @"Missing name");
}

Note the (ab)use of -valueForKey: to transform an array of user objects into an array of NSString objects, making the -containsObject: call simpler. This will only work if your user object is key-value coding compliant for the fullName property.