Writing unittests about alfred-workflow

[deanishe]

Typically, you shouldn't call your main function in unit tests. You should keep it simple and move the functionality to other functions/classes that you call from a barebones main. The general rule is that if you can't isolate a function to unit test it, it isn't designed well and you need to refactor the code anyway.

That won't help you capture the output of Workflow however. To do that you would temporarily reassign sys.stdout (which is what Workflow writes its XML output to) to a StringIO object and read the results from there:

from StringIO import StringIO

fp = StringIO()

# reassign sys.stdout to StringIO instance
orig_stdout = sys.stdout
sys.stdout = fp

# whatever code that makes `Workflow` do its thing here
wf.send_feedback()

# set sys.stdout back to its proper value (a `finally` clause may be a better place for this)
sys.stdout = orig_stdout

# retrieve Workflow output from the StringIO instance
self.assertEqual(fp.getvalue(), expected_value)