Question

I’m writing a test for some existing Ruby code which looks something like

module Foo
  module Bar

    private

    def function_i_want_to_test (a, b)
      if controller.is_something? a, b
        puts a
      else
        puts b
      end
    end
  end
end

The varaible controller magically inserted into the function from somewhere else. To access this function from my tests, I can do include Foo::Bar in my test class and call the function normally afterwards. Unfortunately this doesn’t work as controller isn’t set. Any ideas how I could set the controller variable from my test?

Answer 1

The module seems to assume “controller” is available in the class/module it’s being included into. Perhaps it’s for inclusion in Rails ActionController classes? Also, it’s probably meant to be a method call, not a local variable. So, do something like this:

class MyClass
  include Foo::Bar

  def controller
    # Do stuff.
  end
end

For a test, you can also use Mocha (or other mocking libs) to make the process a little less verbose.

def test_my_thing
  thing = Object.new
  thing.extend(Foo::Bar)
  thing.expects(:controller).returns("whatever")
end