Mocking

Fake objects

Create a fake object with no attributes:

fake = flexmock()

Specify attribute/return value pairs:

fake_plane = flexmock(model="MIG-16", condition="used")

Specify methods/return value pairs:

fake_plane = flexmock(fly=lambda: "voooosh!", land=lambda: "landed!")

You can mix method and non-method attributes by making the return value a lambda for callable attributes.

Flexmock fake objects support the full range of flexmock commands but differ from partial mocks (described below) in that should_receive() can assign them new methods rather than being limited to acting on methods they already possess.

fake_plane = flexmock(fly=lambda: "vooosh!")
fake_plane.should_receive("land").and_return("landed!")

Partial mocks

Flexmock provides three syntactic ways to hook into an existing object and override its methods.

Mark the object as partially mocked, allowing it to be used to create new expectations:

flexmock(plane)
plane.should_receive("fly").and_return("vooosh!").once()
plane.should_receive("land").and_return("landed!").once()

Note

If you do not provide a return value then None is returned by default. Thus, and_return() is equivalent to and_return(None) is equivalent to simply leaving off and_return.

Equivalent syntax assigns the partially mocked object to a variable:

plane = flexmock(plane)
plane.should_receive("fly").and_return("vooosh!").once()
plane.should_receive("land").and_return("landed!").once()

Or you can combine everything into one line if there is only one method to override:

flexmock(plane).should_receive("fly").and_return("vooosh!").once()

You can also return the mock object after setting the expectations:

plane = flexmock(plane).should_receive("fly").and_return("vooosh!").mock()

Note the mock modifier above -- the expectation chain returns an Expectation otherwise:

plane.should_receive("land").with_args().and_return("foo", "bar")

Note

If you do not provide a with_args() modifier then any set of arguments, including none, will be matched. However, if you specify with_args() the expectation will only match exactly zero arguments.

Attributes and properties

Just as you are able to stub return values for functions and methods, flexmock also allows to stub out non-callable attributes and even (getter) properties. Syntax for this is exactly the same as for methods and functions.

Shorthand

Instead of writing out the lengthy should_receive/and_return statements, you can also use the handy shorthand approach of passing them in as key=value pairs to the flexmock() function. For example, we can stub out two methods of the plane object in the same call:

flexmock(plane, fly="voooosh!", land=("foo", "bar"))

This approach is handy and quick but only limited to stubs, i.e. it is not possible to further modify these kind of calls with any of the usual modifiers described below.

Class level mocks

If the object you partially mock is a class, flexmock effectively replaces the method for all instances of that class.

class User:
    def get_name(self):
        return "George Bush"

flexmock(User)
User.should_receive("get_name").and_return("Bill Clinton")
bubba = User()
bubba.get_name()  # returns "Bill Clinton"

Raising exceptions

You can make the mocked method raise an exception instead of returning a value:

flexmock(plane).should_receive("fly").and_raise(BadWeatherException)

You can also add a message to the exception being raised:

flexmock(plane).should_receive("fly").and_raise(
    BadWeatherException, "Oh noes, rain!"
)

Private methods

One of the small pains of writing unit tests is that it can be difficult to get at the private methods since Python "conveniently" renames them when you try to access them from outside the object. With flexmock there is nothing special you need to do to -- mocking private methods is exactly the same as any other methods.