Hey,
I just ran into a situation where I would like to expect a method call
with an argument I know and another one, which is a random number. I
think mocking up the rand method is somehow ugly so I thought maybe
this is the first time where I can take something from Java to Ruby 
Java’s EasyMock mocking library knows things like “anyObject()” and
“anyInteger()” in their method equivalent to should_receive. I like
the idea so I added this to my Rails spec_helper.rb:
class AnyObjectComparator
attr_reader :object
def ==(other)
@object = other
true
end
end
class AnyNumberComparator < AnyObjectComparator
def ==(other)
super.==(other)
other.is_a?(Numeric)
end
end
def any_object
@any_object ||= AnyObjectComparator.new
@any_object
end
def any_number
@any_number ||= AnyNumberComparator.new
@any_number
end
Which gives me the ability to do the should_receive call like this:
Item.should_receive(:random_item).with(any_object,
any_number).at_least(1).times.and_return(mock_model(Item))
(the first any_object parameter is only in there for demonstration
purposes )
And if I would like to it’s possible to get the actual value which was
passed to as an argument with: any_xxx.object
Ok, these any_xxx things behave somehow like a singleton but it’s no
problem at all to instantiate more of them to use many of them and
afterwards get the actual value of any of them.
So long. My question is: Is this too much effort? Is something like
this already built into RSpec, I can’t find something but I can’t
believe there isn’t and could this be done smarter? This singleton
like behavior of any_xxx feels grubby.
Thank you a lot!
Thorben