jafrog's dev blog

Annoyingly large amount of time was spent by me trying to figure out a way to mock constants / classes in tests for our Rails project. The trick is not only in defining the correct constant in the correct namespace, but also in removing it afterwards so the rest of the tests in the suite still use the original one.

So here’s trivial but nevertheless useful snippet to do just that.

describe ModuleName::ClassName do
  unless ModuleName.const_defined?(:ClassToMock)
    before do
      ModuleName.send(:const_set, "ClassToMock", Struct.new(:foo, :bar))
    end

    after do
      ModuleName.send(:remove_const, "ClassToMock")
    end
  end
  ...
end

Here I used MiniTest, but the same could be done with RSpec or Test::Unit’s setup and teardown methods.

What exactly is it useful for? If the test runs in isolation it contains everything it needs because all dependencies for ModuleName::ClassName you don’t care about are mocked. Very useful when developing a feature as you don’t have to load any extra code and the test runs very fast.

As soon as you’re done and the test becomes a part of the suite, ClassToMock should no longer be mocked as the whole app’s code is loaded anyway when running all tests together. So when ClassToMock is defined before and after blocks are omitted. Nice and tidy.