How do I stub things in MiniTest?

Question

Within my test I want to stub a canned response for any instance of a class.

It might look like something like:

Book.stubs(:title).any_instance().returns("War and Peace")

Then whenever I call @book.title it returns "War and Peace".

Is there a way to do this within MiniTest? If yes, can you give me an example code snippet?

Or do I need something like mocha?

MiniTest does support Mocks but Mocks are overkill for what I need.

Answer 1

  # Create a mock object
  book = MiniTest::Mock.new
  # Set the mock to expect :title, return "War and Piece"
  # (note that unless we call book.verify, minitest will
  # not check that :title was called)
  book.expect :title, "War and Piece"

  # Stub Book.new to return the mock object
  # (only within the scope of the block)
  Book.stub :new, book do
    wp = Book.new # returns the mock object
    wp.title      # => "War and Piece"
  end