testing local vars and exceptions

[Raymond O'connor]

Hi
Two questions:
I'm new to testing, so my apologies if this is really basic, but is
there anyway to test the value of a local variable in my unit tests? So
far I've been making everything instance vars that don't really need to
be, so I can see their value in my unit tests.

Also, one of my methods calls another method in a 3rd party library that
could throw an exception if there's no network connection. My method
has some special logic in it to handle this exception. I would like to
test this in a unit test for the method but I can't figure out how to
throw this exception since its raised in a method I don't have control
over. I guess I could put a 'raise exception if test' in my method but
that doesn't seem right. Is there any better way to test this?

Thanks in advance for the help,
-Ray

 

[Pit Capitain]

I'm new to testing, so my apologies if this is really basic, but is
there anyway to test the value of a local variable in my unit tests? So
far I've been making everything instance vars that don't really need to
be, so I can see their value in my unit tests.

I have never needed to test local variables. Can you give an example why
you would like to do this?

Also, one of my methods calls another method in a 3rd party library that
could throw an exception if there's no network connection. My method
has some special logic in it to handle this exception. I would like to
test this in a unit test for the method but I can't figure out how to
throw this exception since its raised in a method I don't have control
over. I guess I could put a 'raise exception if test' in my method but
that doesn't seem right. Is there any better way to test this?

Test doubles. See
http://www.martinfowler.com/articles/mocksArentStubs.html for an
explanation. There are some Ruby frameworks you can use. Look for "mock"
on http://rubyforge.org.

Regards,
Pit