Mock Objects

Mock Objects

Sometimes during testing you need to interact with a deterministic object that for various reasons you do not have access to in your testing environment. For instance:

• The real object is nondeterministic, such as a real-time stock or weather-feed.

• The real object is too slow for your test suites, such as an overloaded transactional production database.

• You need to test exceptional situations, such as an intrusion alarm or systems outage.

• The real object does not exist. This can be anything from not having access to the required object to required intra-object functionality.

Essentially, a mock object is an object that feigns enough functionality or required functionality for you to fully test your system.

For instance, if you wanted to test for session timeouts, errors, or just malicious cracking you might import mock-widgetsession.phpm, which consists of:

   class MockWidgetSession extends WidgetSession {        public function getUserObject() {            return new WidgetUser(                array (                    'id' => 1,                    'username' => 'ed',                    'md5_pw' => "827ccb0eea8a706c4c34a16891f84e7b",                    'first_name' => "Ed",                    'last_name' => "Lecky-Thompson",                    'email' => "[e-mail]",                    'role' => "s",                    'department' => "sales"));        }    } 

Coding details aside, this MockWidgetSession example would allow your testing environment to simulate a login for whatever reason you require.

Smarty can also be used to mock up HTML screens. Other than displaying the HTML to the screen, you can save the HTML in a variable and do with it as you please.

For instance, Story 6 requires sales manager notification, so you merely need to send an e-mail to the managers when the contacts are saved. Sounds pretty simple, but you're faced with an issue of how intensively you'd like to test, especially since they'd like the content of the e-mail to include the HTML from the input screen.

Getting the screen HTML is not an issue. Essentially, you need to test the browser output, which is nice because up until now, you haven't been testing what the browser sees. For end-to-end completeness, the following test will reference the HTML output using a regular expression.

         function testContactEmail () {              $u = new WidgetUser(                  array ('id'         => 1,                         'username'   => "ed",                         'first_name' => "Ed",                         'last_name'  => "Lecky-Thompson",                         'email'      => "[e-mail]",                         'role'       => "s",                         'department' => "sales"));              $cv = new ContactVisit (                  array ('emp_id'             => "1",                         'week_start'         => "1980-01-01",                         'company_name'       => "test one",                         'contact_name'       => "Big One",                         'city'               => "Columbus",                         'state'              => "OH",                         'accomplishments'    => "phone call",                         'followup'           => "",                         'literature_request' => ""));              $c = new Contact (                  array ("emp_id"             => "1",                         "week_start"         => "1980-01-01",                         "shop_calls"         => 2,                         "distributor_calls"  => 3,                         "engineer_calls"     => 4,                         "mileage"            => 50,                         "territory_worked"   => "Central Ohio",                         "territory_comments" => "Buckeyes are great."),                  $this->_session->getDatabaseHandle());              list ($email,_$from, $subject, $message, $headers) =                  generateContactEmail($u, $c, array ($cv), false);              // test screen capture, requires 7bit ascii encoding (read: none)              $this->assertEquals(1, preg_match ("/Employee Name..............Ed     Lecky-Thompson/", $message), "employee name");              $this->assertEquals(1, preg_match     ("/company_name_0........................................test one/",    $message), "company name");             $this->assertEquals(1, preg_match     ("/shop_calls.................................2/", $message),"shop calls");             $this->assertEquals(1, preg_match ("/To: [e-mail]/",     $headers),"email");             // test base64 encoding             list ($email_from, $subject, $message, $headers) =                 generateContactEmail($u, $c, array ($cv));             $this->assertEquals(0, preg_match ("/Employee Name..............Ed    Lecky-Thompson/", $message), "employee name");             $this->assertEquals(1, preg_match ("/To: [e-mail]/",     $headers),"email");         }