Returning a mock object from a mock object
- by Songo
I'm trying to return an object when mocking a parser class. This is the test code using PHPUnit 3.7
//set up the result object that I want to be returned from the call to parse method
$parserResult= new ParserResult();
$parserResult->setSegment('some string');
//set up the stub Parser object
$stubParser=$this->getMock('Parser');
$stubParser->expects($this->any())
->method('parse')
->will($this->returnValue($parserResult));
//injecting the stub to my client class
$fileHeaderParser= new FileWriter($stubParser);
$output=$fileParser->writeStringToFile();
Inside my writeStringToFile() method I'm using $parserResult like this:
writeStringToFile(){
//Some code...
$parserResult=$parser->parse();
$segment=$parserResult->getSegment();//that's why I set the segment in the test.
}
Should I mock ParserResult in the first place, so that the mock returns a mock?
Is it good design for mocks to return mocks?
Is there a better approach to do this all?!
