[TIP] mock a base class and imported modules?

[Michael Foord]

On 9 Mar 2012, at 11:44, skip at pobox.com wrote:

> I have a class to test which subclasses gobject.GObject:
> 
>    http://www.pygtk.org/docs/pygobject/class-gobject.html
> 
> I don't really need much of the base class for my testing except the ability
> to emit signals.  Is there some way to mock the base class before importing
> the module containing my class?  Skeletal example:
> 
>    import gobject
>    import another_module
> 
>    class MyClass(gobject.GObject):
>        def __init__(self, ...)
>            gobject.GObject.__init__(self)
>            ...
> 
>        def some_method(self, ...);
>            x = another_module.SomeClass()
>            ...
> 
>        def another_method(self, ...):
>            ...
>            self.emit("mysignal", ...)
> 
> The emit method comes from the base class.
> 
> Reading the documentation for the patch decorator it's not clear to me that
> mock will get a shot at replacing the gobject.GObject reference before
> MyClass is defined.  I assume (without empirical proof at this point) that I
> will be able to use patch to stub out another_module.SomeClass though, since
> it isn't used until I have a MyClass instance.
> 
> Any suggestions appreciated.  (Mock usage is still very new to me.  You will
> probably have to use very small words and speak slowly.)


You're correct that in general you can't use mock / patch to replace base classes for a class that has already been defined (imported). For another_module.SomeClass you can patch it because the lookup is done at runtime rather than import time.

Although it is possible to replace Class.__bases__ it can only be with a tuple of real classes, and not a mock object, and there are several other restrictions that make it hard for this to be a useful approach.

You *could* mock gobject.GObject before your code is imported by putting a mock gobject into sys.modules using patch.dict:

mock_gobject = MagicMock()
mock_gobject.GObject.__bases__ = (object,)
with patch.dict('sys.modules', gobject=mock_gobject):
	import mycode
	...


This will work because although you can't patch Class.__bases__ to contain a mock, you can subclass a mock object if it has a __bases__ attribute (!).

>>> from mock import MagicMock
>>> m = MagicMock(name='klass')
>>> m.__bases__ = (object,)
>>> class Foo(m): pass
... 
>>> Foo
<MagicMock spec='str' id='4300695632'>


Michael


> 
> Thx,
> 
> -- 
> Skip Montanaro - skip at pobox.com - http://www.smontanaro.net/
> 
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