I've essentially broken my GUI logic out into a rough MVP pattern and while I find testing the Models and Presenters straightforward, I haven't come up with a repeatable process to test drive the code in the Views.
Granted, my views are dumb and have no real business logic - but for instance, if something is disabled, I could test that certain fields are set to 'readonly', or greyed out, etc.
I generally use mocks and inject dependencies everywhere else in the app - but that isn't as feasible in the views. Buttons, toggles and segemented controls aren't something the parent view can just swap out, replace and layout correctly. Injection doesn't feel right and so, because Views are so 'self contained' - I find myself newing child components up inside of their parent views and as such, I'm not sure how to TDD them without exposing their internals somehow.
Would great appreciate some suggestions.
Thanks,
-Luther
I don't know anything about iOS programming, so what I say might be completely useless to you. ?Anyway I will try a suggestion:
Can you imagine to test drive not the view themselves, but the code that builds the view? ?If this was a web application, I may want to write something like
the view builder:
...
view.addHeading("foo");
view.addParagraph("bar");
...
the view object contains methods that make calls to the display technology. ?In html that would be just
void addHeading(String content) {
? this.html += "
" + content + "
";
}
in iOS you would have calls to the iOS APIs in there. ?The view builders would know nothing of iOS and could be easily test-driven.
Once you have a?
void addGrayedOutButton(String title)
method working, and you know that it works because you've seen it working once, you shouldn't need much more testing unless you change its body.
