rails and unit tests

today i came across a case when i wanted to test some code that would eventually be running on the rails environment (a bj job) but didn't really have anything Rails-y other than logging via Rails.logger.debug etc.

i ended up creating a stub for the rails logger so that i could run this as a simple unit test case instead of a rails test case which take a helluva long time.

add a new file called 'rails_stub.rb' into your test folder. in that dump the following code-

module Rails
  #rails stub
  def Rails::logger
    return Rails::Logger.new
  end
  class Rails::Logger
    def debug string
      log "DEBUG:\t"+string
    end
    def info string
      log "INFO:\t"+string
    end
    private
    def log string
      # adding a prefix
      print "RAILS_LOG:"+string
    end
  end
end

in the test case, just require rails.rb and you are set to go., running the test case from the command line will dump the logs onto the terminal.

exercise for the future- get this stub logger to be a littl emore fancy- supress by level etc.

unit testing private methods in ruby

don't u just love this???

class Class
    def publicize_methods
        saved_private_instance_methods = self.private_instance_methods
        self.class_eval { public *saved_private_instance_methods }
        yield
        self.class_eval { private *saved_private_instance_methods }
      end
end

and to test the private method blah of a class Foo

class TestFoo &Test::Unit::TestCase
  def test_blah
    Foo.publicize_methods do
      assert_not_nil Foo.blah
    end
  end
end 

and thats it... :)