One RSpec stub, many return values

Using RSpec Mocks it is trivially easy to stub a single method:

colors.stub(:favorite).with("Person A").and_return("Mauve")

It is also easy to have different stubs for different arguments:

colors.stub(:favorite).with("Person A").and_return("Mauve")
colors.stub(:favorite).with("Person B").and_return("Olive")

However, the other day I needed to stub out the same method many times for a fair amount of different arguments and repeating the foo.stub(...).with(...).and_return() part gets tedious real fast.

Thankfully, RSpec stubs have a way around this.

RSpec docs call this a “Stub with substitute implementation”. You simply setup a fake implementation for a method by passing the stub a block.

We can use this to setup a look up table inside the stubbed method to give is pretty granular control over what it returns:

colors.stub(:favorite) do |argument|
  values = {"Person A" => "Mauve", "Person B => "Olive"}
  return values[argument]
end

This way, whenever your tests call colors.favorite the argument they pass along is used to look up the returned result in the Hash inside the stub.

This has proven quite useful when your FavoriteColorService talks to a DNA sequencer live and we don’t want each test run to wait 4 weeks for each result.