[TIP] Issue with "mock" package and isinstance()

Tom Davis tom at recursivedream.com
Fri Jul 29 09:31:44 PDT 2011


Hey all,

I've been using Michael Foord's awesome /mock/ package and I've loved 
it... now I'm running into an issue. I'm patching a class, pretty simple:

    from my.module.path import Class
    patch = mock.patch('my.module.path.Class', spec=Class)
    mocked = patch.start()
    mocked.return_value = MyReplacementClass()

I'm doing things this way because I need to mock out a class, but 
provide an alternate implementation that uses similar logic to the real 
class (basically mocking an external API by turning it into a 
memory-mapped API).

Somewhere else, my code gets this mock client and a function calls:

    isinstance(client, my.module.path.Class): ...

This call fails with:

    TypeError: isinstance() arg 2 must be a class, type, or tuple of
    classes and type

This was confusing to me, so I did a bit of digging to figure out what 
/Class/ really was, but all was well. Here's what I got:

    <MagicMock spec='Class' id='50389456'>

Seems right to me! Additionally, if I change the instance check in the 
production code to:

    isinstance(client, my.module.path.Class._spec_class): ...

It works just fine! I can't do this for obvious reasons, but it seems to 
prove that the MagicMock at least has the correct information somewhere, 
it's just not being properly inspected by isinstance().

Any thoughts? I really need this to work.
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