Recently, I was trying to write a Unit Test for a Grails method which instantiates an HTTPBuilder object within a method.

I couldn’t use the normal Grails ‘mockFor’ syntax, because the HTTBuilder was not injected or accessible from outside the class. No problem, because standard Groovy MockFor is also available.

With a bit of help from google (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9101084/groovy-httpbuilder-mocking-the-response) I came up with the test below.

def testDoSomething() {
    def requestDelegate = [response: [:], uri: [:]]

    def mockHttpBuilder = new MockFor(groovyx.net.http.HTTPBuilder)
			
    mockHttpBuilder.demand.request { Method method, Closure body ->
        body.delegate = requestDelegate
        body.call()
        requestDelegate.response.success() // make it call success
    }

    mockHttpBuilder.use {
        // All calls to HTTPBuilder will be intercepted within this block of code.      
        MyClient myClient = new MyClient();
        assert myClient.doSomething("Some Param")
    }
}

This works really well in isolating the code under test from the HTTP request.

However after spending a bit of time working on this test, and getting it to pass, I ran test-app on the entire project, and was very confused to see that some totally unrelated tests had begin to fail. Grails was reporting errors like “No more calls to ‘get’ expected at this point.” in tests where I had used no mocking at all. I was bewildered.

Eventually I came across GRAILS-8535. Although unit tests are supposed to be just that, it seems that grails continues to use the proxy in subsequent tests. This appears to be fixed in Grails 2.2.3, but as of the time of writing, this wasn’t released.

Luckily, it is possible to manually reset the MetaClass in the Grails MetaClassRegistry at the end of the test.

At the start of the test which uses MockFor, I record what the class was originally:

MetaClassRegistry registry = GrailsMetaClassUtils.getRegistry()
def originalMetaClass = registry.getMetaClass(HTTPBuilder)

And at the end of the test, set it back:

MetaClassRegistryCleaner.addAlteredMetaClass(HTTPBuilder, originalMetaClass) 

157

52