How to properly mock a struct with member functions in Golang?

Question

I have two structs: FunctionalityClient and TestClient , both implementing Interface . I have a global variable Client of type Interface . I assign to Client either the actual client, or the mock client, depending on whether it's a test or a normal run.

Interface has a method Request that I want to mock in tests. That is, I want to:

• record what were the argument passed to the function
• return some arbitrarily defined return value from the function

So the struct looks like this:

type TestClient struct {
     recordedArgs []interface{}
     returnValues []interface{}
}
func (c *TestClient) Request(body io.Reader, method string, endpoint string, headers []Header) ([]byte, error) {
    c.recordedArgs = append(c.recordedArgs, []interface{}{body, method, endpoint, headers})  // this can't be typed if I want the code to be reusable
        if len(c.returnValues) != 0 {
        last := c.returnValues[0]
        c.returnValues = c.returnValues[1:]
        return last.([]byte), nil
    }
    return nil, nil
}

And I use it like so:

testClient := TestClient{
    returnValues: []interface{}{
        []byte("arbitrarily defined return value"),
        []byte("this will be returned after calling Request a second time"),
    }
}
Client = &testClient
// run the test
// now let's check the results
r1 := testClient.recordedArgs[1].([]interface{})  // because I append untyped lists to recordedArgs
assert.Equal(t, "POST", r1[1].(string))
assert.Equal(t, "/file", r1[2].(string))
// and so on

Now the question.

I have a few structs that I want to mock like this. Currently I just copy and paste the code above for each struct. But that really sucks, I would like the mock logic to be abstracted away somehow. I would also accept something like Mockito's when : when the mocked function is called with specific arguments, return a specific value and record the call.

How can I properly mock a struct with member functions in Golang?

Answer 1

If you're mocking out clients for HTTP APIs, you might want to just use httptest.Server , which would simplify this tremendously. Rather than mocking out the client, mock out the server the client connects to. It's really easy to use, and you can still record the request method, path, body, etc., as well as returning arbitrary response values the same way you're doing with the mock client.

If that's not an option, you can abstract out your mock method to make it reusable:

type TestClient struct {
     recordedArgs [][]interface{}
     returnValues []interface{}
}

func (c *TestClient) mock(args ...interface{}) interface{} {
    c.recordedArgs = append(c.recordedArgs, args)
    if len(c.returnValues) != 0 {
        last := c.returnValues[0]
        c.returnValues = c.returnValues[1:]
        return last
    }
    return nil
}

func (c *TestClient) Request(body io.Reader, method string, endpoint string, headers []Header) ([]byte, error) {
    return c.mock(body,method,endpoint,headers).([]byte), nil
}

This cuts your usage-specific method down to one line.