Partial Stubs
Explore how to implement partial stubs in Rails using RSpec's allow method to override specific object methods. Understand verifying partial doubles, stubbing classes and instance methods, simulating error conditions, and best practices in legacy code testing. This lesson helps you write isolated, efficient tests by controlling test double behavior and avoiding unnecessary database access.
We might use a full double object to stand in for an entire object unavailable or prohibitively expensive to create or call in the test environment. We can also take advantage of how Ruby allows us to open up existing classes and objects to add or override methods. It’s easy to take a “real” object and stub out only the methods we need. This is extraordinarily useful when it comes to actual uses of stub objects.
In RSpec, partial stubs are managed with the allow method: