Ruby on Rails

Fearless Fool wrote in post #978383:
> So first, thanks in no small part to Marnen's rants, I've become a
> complete RSpec / FactoryGirl / TDD convert. Hey, autotest coupled with
> Growl is the bee knees! And I've even started pushing builds out to
> Heroku to keep me honest.
>
> Now I feel uneasy when I've written a piece of code that isn't covered
> by an effective test. That's how it should be.

Excellent! Glad to have shown someone else the light.

>
> But I'm stumped on how to test the following, so I turn to the
> collective wisdom of the RoR forum.
>
> My app periodically needs to fetch XML data from external sites. To
> avoid inadvertently pummeling the external servers, I've written some
> extensions to Mechanize that observe the following rules:
>
> - any XML data I fetch from the external site is cached

The external site isn't already setting its HTTP caching headers
properly for this?

> - I will NOT fetch if the most recent attempt was less than K hours ago
> - I will fetch the data if it's absent or stale (i.e. older then J days)
>
> Testing it manually, it works like a champ. But how the heck do I
> automate the testing? It seems I need to fake up the Mechanize GET
> method so I can simulate various failure modes, etc. Do I create a
> FactoryGirl stub (or mock???). So I'm looking for suggestions and
> (ideally) examples of how experienced testers would test this.

Use Webmock, and perhaps VCR. There is an introductory Webmock
presentation on my GitHub account.

>
> TIA.
>
> - ff

Best,
-- 
Marnen Laibow-Koser
http://www.marnen.org
marnen@marnen.org

Sent from my iPhone

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