My Kind of Stupid

While I was working on unit tests for Git Push, I wanted to mock my delegate so I could create an expectation. So I used OCMock:

id delegate = [OCMockObject mockForProtocol:@protocol(MyDelegateProtocol)];
[[delegate expect] someMethod];
myClassIvar.connectionDelegate = delegate;
[myClassIvar someOtherMethod];
STAssertNoThrow([delegate verify], @"should have called someMethod on delegate");

But found the assertion failing. I stepped into #someOtherMethod and discovered the delegate was nil. So I added

STAssertNotNil(myClassIvar.connectionDelegate, @"should have set delegate");

And watched that fail as well. Since Git Push is using ARC, I read up on retain semantics to see if I was missing something about local references. But local references are strong, so the delegate should not have been deallocated yet.

I posted about this issue on Stack Overflow ¹, where Evan suggested that OCMock may be the issue. Sure enough, creating an explicit class conforming to my delegate protocol fixed the issue.

@interface MockDelegate : NSObject <MyDelegateProtocol>
@property (nonatomic, strong) NSNumber *called;
@end
@implementation MockDelegate
@synthesize called = _called;
- (void)someMethod {
  _called = [NSNumber numberWithBool:YES];
}
@end

@implementation MyClassTests
- (void)testSomeOtherMethod {
  MockDelegate *delegate = [[MockDelegate alloc] init];
  myClassIvar.connectionDelegate = delegate;
  [myClassIvar someOtherMethod];
  STAssertTrue([delegate.called boolValue], @"should have called someMethod on delegate");
}
@end

I still don't understand why it was being deallocated, but it was definitely related to OCMock. I've isolated the issue in a Github repo to make it obvious and repeatable.

UPDATE: Erik Doernenberg of OCMock looked into the issue and answered the Stack Overflow question as well, and determined it's actually an issue with NSProxy objects and ARC in the iOS runtime. It works fine on OS X.