An Architect's View

I'm working on a ColdBox project right now for a client and, as some may have gathered from my occasional tweets, I've set up Hudson as a Continuous Integration server that pulls the latest code from git, restarts the test server instance, reloads the test database and automatically runs the MXUnit-based test suite, whenever someone commits files to the main git repository. We have unit tests for individual components and we have integration tests for the ColdBox event handlers. Luis has provided pretty good documentation for writing such tests but one of the challenges I faced in getting some of the integration tests working was that they redirected to a new event!Since you can't 'catch' a redirect, how can you test such handlers? ColdBox provides a relocate() method for handlers to perform redirects and it uses the <cflocation> tag. We can't change the core files but we might be able to change things at runtime to replace the framework's relocate() method with something more testable... If relocate() used <cfabort> with showerror=, then it could be caught as an exception and a test case could be written. So what we want is for the relocate() function to look something like this: The question is: how do we replace ColdBox's function? ColdBox provides a lot of 'events' in its lifecycle and you can write CFCs to intercept any of them. One of them is afterHandlerCreation so in theory you could write an interceptor for that which patched the runtime instance. Unfortunately, the ColdBox documentation didn't say how that event worked! I pinged Luis and he promptly updated the documentation and here is how you do it: Create an interceptor to do the patching - I called mine test.mock.interceptor.HandlerRelocatePatch: Once registered (see below), this is called after each event handler is created and it first injects a new public method called _fakeInjector (as a copy of the methodInjector code in the interceptor) and then it calls that new method to perform the injection of the private method relocate()! All you need to do is register the interceptor in your test case: Happy testing!