Question

I’m writing unit tests for my grails application, and I realized I don’t really know the proper way to assert whether an object is the proper object or not.

For example, given this test:

void testExampleTest() {
    mockSession.person = new Person(firstName:'John', lastName:'Doe', middleInitial:'E')
    def model = controller.testMethod()
    ...assertions...
}

and

def testMethod = {
    Person currPerson = session.getAttribute("person")
    render(view:'view',model:[person:currPerson]
}

how should I make sure that the person object I added to the session is properly being passed in the model? Is it sufficient to use

assertEquals( person,model['person'] )

or because I injected the object myself into the session does it make more sense to use

assertEquals( person.firstName, model['person'].firstName )
assertEquals( person.lastName, model['person'].lastName )
assertequals( person.middleName, model['person'].middleName )

It seems to me that the first way should suffice as long as the object has a properly defined equals method, but I just wanted to see what the conventional way is.

Thanks

Answer 1

Property-by-property comparison needs to be repeated in every test – so it’s a good old code duplication, a test smell described in XUnitPatterns. Better have a proper equals().

Of course, you can add an utility method personEquals() or even override Person.equals() in runtime. For mocked class, you will probably have to. I personally stick to shorter code which is just one assertEquals() when possible.