leveraging the existing functionality for configuring mocks

[nirwall]

Is there a way to use the functionality for configuring a mock to return specific values (using side_effect as it seems from how mock works) when called with specific parameters?

[Xion]

AFAIK, the built-in Python mocks do not support this. You will probably need to implement such logic inside a custom function and assign it to side_effect, e.g.:

def dispatcher(arg):
    if isinstance(arg, int):
        return int_version(arg)
    if isinstance(arg, str):
        return str_version(arg)
    # etc.

mock = Mock()
mock.side_effect = dispatcher

Note that such mocking is intentionally outside of scope of callee (though it could be part of a bigger library that combines callee with unittest.mock to provide some of the functionality of Java's Mockito, incl. the when-then style of mocking).

[nirwall]

Thanks!