Test Utilities

For your convenience Toucan makings testing easy with Temporary Objects. A temporary object is created and made available to some body of code, and then wiped from that database via a finally statement (i.e., whether the body completes successfully or not). This makes it easy to write tests that do not change your test database when they are ran.

Here's an example of a unit test using a temporary object created via with-temp:

;; Make sure newly created users aren't admins
(expect false
  (with-temp User [user {:first-name "Cam", :last-name "Saul"}]
    (is-admin? user)))

In this example, a new instance of User is created (via the normal insert! pathway), and bound to user; the body of with-temp (the test-something fncall) is executed. Immediately after, the user is removed from the Database, but the entire statement returns the results of the body (hopefully false).

Often a Model will require that many fields be NOT NULL, and specifying all of them in every test can get tedious. In the example above, we don't care about the :first-name or :last-name of the user. We can provide default values for temporary objects by implementing the WithTempDefaults protocol:

(defn- random-name
  "Generate a random name of 10 uppercase characters"
  []
  (apply str (map char (repeatedly 10 #(rand-nth (range (int \A) (inc (int \Z))))))))

(extend-protocol WithTempDefaults
  (class User)
  (with-temp-defaults [_] {:first-name (random-name), :last-name (random-name)}))

Now whenever we use with-temp to create a temporary User, a random :first-name and :last-name will be provided.

(with-temp User [user]
  user)
;; -> {:first-name "RIQGVIDTZN", :last-name "GMYROFEZYO", ...}

You can still override any of the defaults, however:

(with-temp User [user {:first-name "Cam"}]
  user)
;; -> {:first-name "Cam", :last-name "OVTAAJBVOF"}

Finally, Toucan provides a couple more advanced versions of with-temp. The first, with-temp*, can be used to create multiple objects at once:

(with-temp* [User         [user]
             Conversation [convo {:user_id (:id user)}]]
  ...)

Each successive object can reference the temp object before it; the form is equivalent to writing multiple with-temp forms.

The last helper macro is available if you use the expectations unit test framework:

;; Make sure our get-id function works on users
(expect-with-temp [User [user {:first-name "Cam"}]]
  (:id user)
  (get-id user))

This macro makes the temporary object available to both the "expected" and "actual" parts of the test. (PRs for similar macros for other unit test frameworks are welcome!)