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In a previous post I gave an introduction into the complete 180 I’ve done in the web development industry and where I’ve found myself now, and it’s a pretty good place. There have been some mighty challenges, but I feel I’m breaking fairly new ground in the department of Cairngorm asynchronous unit testing. At least, that’s what the results in a Google search would have me believe.

So to continue, I’ll elaborate in more detail about how I accomplished my tests:

1. In my case, the commands were not separated into service delegates and a delegate is imperative for Cairngorm unit testing
2. Follow these steps for modifying the FlexUnit source code to assist in giving your delegates a valid IResponder to work with
3. Build a service component (in our case, /business/Services.mxml) that includes RemoteObjects for your amfphp services
4. Build a test suite as per the FlexUnit documentation or a great blog entry here from Darron Schall - extremely helpful.
5. Create a test model class and use it to store values as a private variable in the test class will be cleared after the tearDown() function is hit (regardless if  you’ve specified any variable cleanup)
6. Build a function in your test suite to call a service from the delegate.

A few things should be kept in mind at this point, you will want to use the IResponder interface in place of Responder in the Cairngorm documentation. This will assist the unit testing process and in turn simplify your test assertions in the test suite. Therefore, in your test suite (which implements IResponder) you will have a result() function where you can run assertions on the service call you just made.

For instance:

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private function result(event:Object):void {
assertTrue("Expected a true result.", testModel.var == true);
}

In the event the variable returns a false, the test runner will display a failure message. Otherwise, it is a passed test.

One suggestion for verifying true data rather than just existing data in the model, is to create an object and force it to have the values the service call should return depending on the parameters sent in, which is something I am likely to implement in the near future.

It sounds like a bit of a hack to hardcode a set of values that you know will exist somewhere, but considering the tools available it appears to be the best course of action. I’ve tried a variation on the FlexUnit package called dpUint but found that it wasn’t much clearer on proper implementation for my exact needs.

If there are any Flex developers that have some experience doing exactly this, feel free to let me in on the big secret. Beer’s on me if you can make my job easier.