Comments on: iPhone SDK: UIViewController Testing & TDD

By: Adoption Curve » Blog Archive » links for 2011-09-07

Adoption Curve » Blog Archive » links for 2011-09-07 — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 07:35:19 +0000

[...] iPhone SDK: UIViewController Testing & TDD | Pathfinder Software Unfortunately there are not enough examples out there on how to test view controllers with the iPhone SDK. My hope is to remedy that a bit by sharing some techniques I have been using to tackle the problem, particularly in keeping with the spirit of TDD along the way. (tags: uiviewcontroller ios testing tdd bdd viewcontroller viewcontrollers ghunit ocmock) [...]

By: Ivan Moscoso

Ivan Moscoso — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 05:44:47 +0000

@Jeffrey: Thanks for your comment. As for the exit code issue, this seems to be by design. I have heard of people working around it by modifying “RunIPhoneUnitTest.sh”.

Take a look at http://code.google.com/p/google-toolbox-for-mac/issues/detail?id=13 for one idea (note: that script doesn’t work with the latest GTM builds– it needs some tweaking). I have made similar modifications to that script in the past, but scrapped it. If I had to do it again, I would just as well rewrite that script in Ruby, and have it take arguments, so as to alter the output of test results.

Come to think of it, that sounds like a great idea.

By: Jeffrey Fredrick

Jeffrey Fredrick — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 00:10:08 +0000

Ivan, I appreciate your examples of unit testing. One problem I have with GTM for iPhone unit testing is that the exit code is always zero: a failed test doesn’t fail the build.

Am I missing something simple?

I’m tempted to work around this in the xcodebuilder for CruiseControl but parsing the output for failures but that is not my first choice.

By: Ivan Moscoso

Ivan Moscoso — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 17:23:07 +0000

@mml: Thanks for the question. I seemed to have left out that important part– from your unit test, invoke ‘loadView’ on your controller immediately after ‘initWithNibName:bundle:’.

‘loadView’ is something you would probably never have to call from your production code (my guess is that it is invoked for you), but it initializes the view hierarchy from the nib. It’s necessary to really bring all of this under test.

By: mml

mml — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 16:26:31 +0000

Hi,

How were you instantiating your test UIViewController?

vanilla alloc.init seems to not instantiate any subviews in my test code, initwithnibname doesn’t even instantiate the main view.