I finally got around to using a mocking library today at work. I chose Mocha to start, no real reason, just the first name to pop into my head. After about 15 minutes (10 reading docs, and 5 coding) I am in love. Seriously, testing has never been this easy. What would have taken me at least 30 minutes to add new fixtures wihtout breaking old tests or screwing anything else up was easily solved in one to 2 lines per test case.

class SupportControllerTest < ActionController::TestCase
  def test_applicant_activated_view
      Applicant.any_instance.expects(:activated?).returns(:true)

      post :create, :applicant => {:last_name => "Leapfrog", :email => "sos_platform@leapfrogqa.com"}
      assert_select "ul.activated"
  end
end

The first line in the above method mocks out the activated? method on any instance of the Applicant class. Isn’t that simple and clean? Without seeing the rest of the business logic I know it might be hard to accept why I need an entire library to help me with this simple boolean method, but trust me, activated? method is actually delegated to another model which is using an ActiveResource object to truly determine the result.