How to test a Formotion Controller? about formotion

[clayallsopp]

The reason your text_field is null is because the viewDidLoad#super was not called, and it absolutely needs to be called (it's where Formotion does all of its setup). What errors were you getting without the RUBYMOTION_ENV == 'test' call?

And as for the triggering navigation button thing, you need to use the standard RubyMotion UI testing libraries. I'm not totally sure how well those work for navigation buttons, but you can try something like tap 'Save'?

[bsbodden]

brian.face << :egg

I uncommented the test environment check and I no longer get an error if I don't reference the controller in scope. So just with:

describe "TodoController" do

The #viewDidLoad method works just fine in testing. If I add a test context controller as in:

describe "TodoController" do
  tests TodoController

I get:

NoMethodError: undefined method `sections' for nil:NilClass
    form_controller.rb:40:in `viewDidLoad': TodoController - saves changes made to a todo
    todo_controller.rb:12:in `viewDidLoad'
    ui.rb:209:in `window'
    ui.rb:182:in `block in extended:'
    spec.rb:272:in `block in run_before_filters'
    spec.rb:272:in `block in run_before_filters'
    spec.rb:403:in `execute_block'
    spec.rb:272:in `run_before_filters'
    spec.rb:292:in `run'

Removing the controller scope removes all the interaction helpers methods like #tap. That why I was trying to get to the @controller.save method directly.

Row Interaction

The textfield out of the row still keeps on coming back as nil.

I can see that the row is the correct one. The puts above returns:

ROW:: key => name, value => Buy Milk, title => name

Calling @controller.save produces the errors below (even if I haven't been able to change any values on the row).

RuntimeError: NSInternalInconsistencyException: attempt to delete row 0 from section 0 which only contains 0 rows before the update
    todos_controller.rb:27:in `todoChanged:': TodoController - saves changes made to a todo
    model.rb:246:in `issue_notification:'
    model.rb:372:in `block in save:'
    model.rb:389:in `call_hooks:'
    model.rb:359:in `save:'
    validatable.rb:37:in `save:'
    todo_controller.rb:19:in `save'
    spec.rb:279:in `block in run_spec_block'
    spec.rb:403:in `execute_block'
    spec.rb:279:in `run_spec_block'
    spec.rb:294:in `run'

I'll keep on playing with it until I way to approach this kind of testing. If you want to take a look I just pushed it to my code to:

https://github.com/integrallis/motion-todos

Cheers & Thanks

[clayallsopp]

So one thing you should try is mimicking how Formotion does controller-testing, which is to re-device the controller method:

describe "FormController/SwitchRow" do
  tests Formotion::FormController

  def controller
    row_settings = { ... }
    @form ||= Formotion::Form.new(row_settings)

    @controller ||= Formotion::FormController.alloc.initWithForm(@form)
  end

  it "should change row value when tapped" do
    # etc
  end
end

I'm not convinced that simply re-assigning the @controller instance variable will work, and this was a problem I ran into when writing the functional tests for Formotion.

See https://github.com/clayallsopp/formotion/blob/master/spec/functional/switch_row_spec.rb, and all the other tests in here: https://github.com/clayallsopp/formotion/tree/master/spec/functional

[bsbodden]

Awesome, I'l give that I try and report back. I'll keep the topic open until I find a good resolution and leave that app as a example to others.

[bsbodden]

Overriding the controller method worked.

describe "TodoController" do
  tests TodoController

  before do
    @now = NSDate.new
    @todo = Todo.create :name => "Buy Milk",
                        :description => "We need some Milk",
                        :due_date => @now
    @controller = TodoController.create(@todo)
    @form = @controller.instance_variable_get("@form")
    @save_button = @controller.instance_variable_get("@save_button")
  end

  def controller
    @controller
  end

The only remaining problems is that I can seem to be able to tap the save button in the navbar, if I put a button anywhere else it's find but for some reason the one in ruby controller.navigationItem.rightBarButtonItem is not available to the test context.