Mocking methods in grails integration test carries over to other tests - grails

Question

I have an integration test where I sometimes want to mock the return of a service method. However, I have seen that once I mock that method, the subsequent tests that call it will also use the mocked function.
Is this normal? If so, how can I have test which sometimes use mocked functions and sometimes use the real implementation?
Here is my code:
MyController {
def someService
def save(){
...
def val = someService.methodToMock()//sometimes want to mock other times, not
...
}
}
MyTest {
def "test 1"(){
...
//I want to mock here
myController.someService.metaClass.methodToMock = { [] }
...
myController.save()
}
def "test 2"(){
...
//I don't want to mock here, however
// it is returning the mocked results
myController.save()
}
}

Answer 1

In general you don't want to change anything to do with metaclasses in integration or functional tests, only in unit tests. It's expected that you'll be doing this in unit tests and there's automatic support for restoring the original metaclass after each test or after each test class runs depending on the version of Grails and how things are configured. But this isn't the case in integration tests.
There are several different approaches you can use. If you use untyped dependency injection, e.g. def someService, then you can overwrite the real service instance with anything you want, and as long as it has the method(s) that you'll be invoking during the test method the controller won't know or care that it's not the real service.
I like to use a map of closures in this case, since Groovy will invoke a closure as if it were a method. So for 'test 1' you could do this:
def "test 1"() {
...
def mockedService = [methodToMock: { args -> return ... }]
myController.someService = mockedService
...
myController.save()
}
This works because you get a new instance of the controller for each test, and you change the service just for that instance, but the real service isn't affected at all.
Your controller invokes someService.methodToMock(), which is actually someService.get('methodToMock').call(), but the map access and closure invocation syntax can take advantage of Groovy's syntactic sugar to look like a regular method call.
Another option is to subclass the service and override the method(s) that you want, and replace the injected instance with that. This or something like it would be necessary if you type the dependency injection (e.g. SomeService someService). Either create a named subclass (class TestSomeService extends SomeService { ... }) or create an anonymous inner class:
def "test 1"() {
...
def mockedService = new SomeService() {
def methodToMock(args) {
return ...
}
}
myController.someService = mockedService
...
myController.save()
}

Answer 2

Altering the metaClass in one test will absolutely affect other tests. You're altering the groovy system, and need to perform some special cleanup if you're metaClassing. At the end my methods where I metaClass, I call a function to revoke the metaClass changes, passing in the name of the class that was metaClassed, and the instance metaClassed if there was one.
def "some authenticated method test"() {
given:
def user = new UserDomain(blah blah blah)
controller.metaClass.getAuthenticatedUser = { return user }
when:
controller.authenticatedMethod() // which references the authenticated user
then:
// validate the results
cleanup:
revokeMetaClassChanges(theControllerClass, controller)
}
private def revokeMetaClassChanges(def type, def instance = null) {
GroovySystem.metaClassRegistry.removeMetaClass(type)
if (instance != null) {
instance.metaClass = null
}
}
Alternatively, you can just mock the service in the test. A method similar to that mentioned by Burt could be:
def "some test"() {
given:
def mockSomeService = mockFor(SomeService)
mockSomeService.demand.methodToMock(1) { def args ->
return []
}
controller.someService = mockSomeService.createMock()
when:
controller.save()
then:
// implement your validations/assertions
}