Testing methods that make http requests

Question

I have some methods in my app that make http requests. Is there a good way to simulate network failures and bad responses for the unit tests?

Answer 1

What we do in this situation is abstract the layer that's making the call. Instead of having your logic directly make the http request, have your code call a function. Within that function can be something like:

if (in_test) {
   response = get_test_response();
} else {
   response = make_http_request();
}

Then you can have your unit tests set some value accessible by the get_test_response() function. This way you can programatically change what the result of that call will be.