[LRUG] Serialising a struct

[Stephen Nelson-Smith]

Hi Graham,


On Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 5:35 PM, Graham Ashton <graham at effectif.com> wrote:

> On 14 Apr 2014, at 17:25, Stephen Nelson-Smith <sanelson at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >> this sounds like a potential opportunity to decouple the part of your
> application that queries AWS from the part that uses the resulting data,
> "hexagonal" style.
> >
> > Yep... that's actually exactly what I've done.  There's a separate class
> whose responsibility is purely to establish a connection via the AWS gem,
> and broker data.  The thinking was that I can test and alter what is behind
> that, as long as the adapter presents a unified interface to the rest of
> the application.
>
> This sounds like an even stronger argument to just build a struct in your
> test and to pass it through to the code under test.
>
> While it may appear simpler on the face of it to just let some code you
> won’t really see serialise stuff and then pass it through to you, your part
> of the app is now dependent on how the other bit evolves. It’s actually
> more complicated.
>

I may have misled you - I wasn't proposing to do this dynamically, or even
more than once - that's insane.  I just wanted to be able to take the 230
odd objects and serialise them once, so I'd have a pot of canned data to
mine, rather than trying to construct it manually.

>
> If building the struct seems messy (as it has a lot of stuff that varies
> depending on how you use it) don’t do that inline. I tend to do this kind
> fo thing in helper methods. You can create structs that are well suited to
> each test with optional parameters.


<snip>

The key benefit of this approach in my view is that everything you need to
> know to determine what the code is acting on is visible in this test file,
> rather than being hidden away inside a lump of XML in a fixture.
>

Yes - I can see a big benefit of that... good call.

S.
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