From #13:
For your issue of wanting to test your processing code with a formal unit test, your intuition is right on. The way people like to do this is to make what's called a mock. It's basically what you said: save a copy of some response to some function call that usually is slow/can fail/etc and test that. This makes unit test unit tests and not integration tests!
I haven't done this directly with testthat, but there appears to be support: https://github.com/r-lib/testthat/blob/master/R/mock.R. Also see https://www.mango-solutions.com/blog/testing-without-the-internet-using-mock-functions.
From #13:
For your issue of wanting to test your processing code with a formal unit test, your intuition is right on. The way people like to do this is to make what's called a mock. It's basically what you said: save a copy of some response to some function call that usually is slow/can fail/etc and test that. This makes unit test unit tests and not integration tests!
I haven't done this directly with testthat, but there appears to be support: https://github.com/r-lib/testthat/blob/master/R/mock.R. Also see https://www.mango-solutions.com/blog/testing-without-the-internet-using-mock-functions.