CODEWITHSUNDEEP
objective-cioshttpmockingnsurlconnection
ma11hew28
ma11hew28

Reputation: 126319

Artifice for Objective-C?

Is there an Objective-C version of Artifice?

If not, how would I design/develop/create it?

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Upvotes: 1

Views: 282

Answers (1)

Luke Redpath
Luke Redpath

Reputation: 10555

I think I might be able to help you here.

I have a Ruby library that is somewhat similar to artifice, albeit more self-contained and built on top of Sinatra, called Mimic. I'm pretty happy with it and one of my favourite features is that as well as being configured using it's Ruby DSL (or using the Sinatra API directly), it can be configured remotely or from any process that speaks HTTP. This means you can use it in your Objective-C tests and configure it from the tests too (rather than having say, a set of external fixtures in a Ruby file).

In the name of eating my own dog food, I recently converted the acceptance tests for my Objective C RestClient port, Resty to use Mimic. The Mimic daemon is started up as part of the build process and my stubs are configured directly in the tests, using a thin Objective-C wrapper around the Mimic REST API.

As you can see, I strive very hard for test clarity!

Those tests use OCUnit but you can use this with Kiwi. In fact, the assertEventually macro in the above tests was the basis of the asynchronous testing support that I ported to Kiwi.

I've since extracted the Objective-C wrapper for Mimic from LRResty and moved it into the Mimic repository. You may want to check out the Resty project to see how my project and the tests are configured. If you have any questions, please ask.

One caveat: I haven't found a way of getting these tests to run successfully in Xcode 4, using the "Test" option, due to the way that it runs. In Xcode 3, I rely on Run Script build phases to start and stop the Mimic daemon, but because Xcode 4 doesn't run the tests as part of the build process this doesn't work. I've tried to accomplish something similar using pre/post test actions but unfortunately these are woefully inadequate due to various bugs.

Bonus tip: I find Charles Debugging Proxy as massive help when working with web services and you can use it with Mimic too; the Objective-C wrapper can be proxied through Charles so you can see exactly what is happening, both in terms of stub configuration and actual HTTP requests (Mimic can even be configured to return some helpful debugging data in the response headers).

Do let me know if you have any questions.

Upvotes: 1

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