[mocha-developer] Stubbing objects and calling to_json on them errors (circular reference)

[John Wilger]

On Oct 20, 2008, at 12:10 PM, Bill Kocik wrote:

>
> I'm right there with ya, John. Sadly the situation I'm in is that  
> I've just joined this project, and it's kind of a mess. In some  
> cases I can mock the object (and I do), but in others there are so  
> many calls to the object, and then calls to objects that come back  
> from those calls, that stubbing all that stuff out is a little bit  
> prohibitive. It's in these situations that I opt to create a genuine  
> object. Our first step in the cleanup effort is to try to increase  
> our test coverage to a level we're comfortable with, so for now I'm  
> stuck with writing less-than-ideal tests for less-than-ideal code.

Using `stub_everything` as opposed to just `stub` can alleviate that  
to some degree, however the one thing I don't like about Mocha is  
`stub_everything` returns nil for all calls. If it instead returned  
`self` by default, then it would work better for this kind of  
situation. (If anyone knows that there /is/ a way to cause Mocha to  
behave this way, please speak up!)

-- 
Regards,

John Wilger