How to call mocked method in Python mock

Question

I want to create a mock method that calls the underlying method being mocked.

I'm imagining something like the following, but I can't find any documentation about the mock object holding a reference to the object being mocked, which I've denoted as [[wrapped_method_foo]] below:

from mock import patch

class Foo(object):
    def __init__(self, state):
        self.state = state
    def foo(self, a):
        print "real foo", a
        return a + self.state

f = Foo(2000)
f.foo(1)

with patch.object(Foo, 'foo', autospec=True) as mock_foo:
    def side_effect(self, a):
        print "mock foo", a
        return mock_foo.[[wrapped_method_foo]](self, a*2)
    mock_foo.side_effect = side_effect

    f.foo(2)

Answer 1

The simplest way is to grab your own reference to the original function before patching. Patching can be done on an individual instance of the class:

original_foo = f.foo
with patch.object(f, 'foo') as mock_foo:
    def side_effect(a):
        print "mock foo", a
        return original_foo(a*2)
    mock_foo.side_effect = side_effect

    f.foo(2)

...or by patching the unbound method on the class:

original_foo = Foo.foo
with patch.object(Foo, 'foo', autospec=True) as mock_foo:
    def side_effect(self, a):
        print "mock foo", a
        return original_foo(self, a*2)
    mock_foo.side_effect = side_effect

    f.foo(3)

Answer 2

patch objects have an undocumented temp_original attribute that you can use.

Here is what I usually do in that case:

from __future__ import print_function
import mock

class Foo(object):
    def __init__(self, state):
        self.state = state

    def foo(self, a):
        print("real foo", a)
        return a + self.state


f = Foo(2000)
f.foo(1)

fake_foo = mock.patch.object(Foo, 'foo', autospec=True)
# def side_effect(*args, **kwargs):  # generic version
def side_effect(self, a):
    print("mock foo", a)
    return fake_foo.temp_original(self, a*2)

with fake_foo as mock_foo:
    mock_foo.side_effect = side_effect

    assert f.foo(2) == 2004

I'm using this when I only use mock to assert that functions where called during tests