testing a rails helper that uses cookies

I have a method in app/helpers/application_helper.rb that calls cookies. Which is totally allowed; this method is working wonderfully in my dev environment and knows what I mean when I say cookies.

I am testing this helper with TestUnit (in test/unit/helpers/application_helper_test.rb) and getting the error

NoMethodError: undefined method `cookies' for nil:NilClass

Even for four tests that do not set cookies. This has nothing to do with needing to 'set cookies in the test using cookie_jar', because the issue isn't that I'm setting cookies and my helper isn't recognizing them, the issue is that the object cookies is being called on is nil.

I wasn't sure which controller object cookies was being called on, so I p'd them all and found that, out of @controller, @request, and @response, only @response is nil. So I tried setting it to "cow". And indeed! My error changes:

NoMethodError: undefined method `cookies' for "cow":String

So it seems like I just need to开发者_如何学运维 stub out @response. How do I do that?

Or am I way out of line here and overcomplicating things?

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Add this setup to all of your tests that exercise this method:

@response.stubs(:cookies).returns({})