Minitest mock or stub methods

Rails
1

Hi

I’m building a small library to use in my Rails app which interacts with
a
3rd party API. It fetches artists and tracks.

So I have:
lib/my_lib.rb
lib/my_lib/artist.rb
lib/my_lib/track.rb

To get an artist I do
artist = MyLib::Artist.find(“Oasis”)
Which returns an instance of Artist if it finds (via 3rd party API) it
or
nil otherwise.

Then I can call artist.tracks which fetches all available tracks at the
3rd
party and returns them as an array.

In my artist class I have a separate method that makes the actual API
calls
and parses the XML response with Nokogiri

def self.find(name: nil)

Stuff…

doc = get_data(some_url)

More stuff…

end

def get_data(req_url)
Nokogiri::XML(open(req_url))
end

When writing my tests I don’t want to hit the actual URL but instead
load
an XML file from disk.

I’m using Minitest which has a mocking library, but how do I actually
mock
(or is it more appropriate to stub?) the method?

2

Hello man,

I think you can easily accomplish this task declaring a variable, using
file.open to read a XML from your file system, and stubbing your method
call on your test. This is the most common way of doing some tests with
third party apis. But, if you want a more reliable way to do some test
with
API, I would recommended for you to try VCR. I am not a minitest guy,
but I
think VCR have setup to works fine with minitest too.

Have a nice day man

On Sunday, June 9, 2013, Linus P. wrote:

To get an artist I do
def self.find(name: nil)
an XML file from disk.
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thiagocifani
Thiago Cifani - Brazil, Software Developer | about.me http://del.icio.us/thiagocifani
http://del.icio.us/thiagocifani

3 
lib/my_lib/track.rb
calls and parses the XML response with Nokogiri

When writing my tests I don't want to hit the actual URL but instead
load an XML file from disk.

I'm using Minitest which has a mocking library, but how do I actually
mock (or is it more appropriate to stub?) the method?

thiagocifani [email protected] wrote:

I think you can easily accomplish this task declaring a variable, using
file.open to read a XML from your file system, and stubbing your method
call on your test. This is the most common way of doing some tests with
third party apis. But, if you want a more reliable way to do some test with
API, I would recommended for you to try VCR. I am not a minitest guy, but I
think VCR have setup to works fine with minitest too.

I suggest you use both WebMock and VCR. WebMock mocks out the HTTP calls
the API code is doing, and lets VCR record the response the first time,
and play it back from then on.