Mocking chain of methods in rspec

Question

There are a chain of methods which gets a user object. I am trying to mock the following to return a user in my Factory Girl

@current_user = AuthorizeApiRequest.call(request.headers).result

I can mock the object up until the call method but I'm stuck at mocking the result method

allow(AuthorizeApiRequest).to receive(:call).and_return(:user)

Solution

I found I need to use receive_message_chain

So this worked for me.

allow(AuthorizeApiRequest).to receive_message_chain(:call, :result).and_return(user)

Comments

[jfc]

This works in some cases, but notice the "Warning" in the doc page: "Chains can be arbitrarily long, which makes it quite painless to violate the Law of Demeter in violent ways, so you should consider any use of receive_message_chain a code smell." They recommend using double or double_instance, as explained here: stackoverflow.com/a/51922393/2233856.