How to write tests to UIActionSheet and its button

Question

I'm trying to write unit tests for my view controller. It is the first view controller in my app and has a 'Account' button on the top left hand corner. Pressing this will present an action sheet, which, for now, has two buttons:

• Logout
• Change Passcode

I want to write tests for this functionality:

• Pressing the 'Account' button should present Action Sheet.
• The Action Sheet should have two buttons: 'Logout' & 'Change Passcode'.
• Pressing the 'logout' button should log the user out.
• Pressing the 'change passcode' button should present the passcode view controller in change passcode mode.

The problem is, if I trigger the Account button in my test, it will try to present an action sheet, which fails because the view of the controller under test is not part of a window, and that means I can't write any of the other tests either.

There are proposed solutions on testing alert views and action sheets, but they require creating a PONSO with the same interface as UIActionSheet, and doing something like this in my view controller:

// in the .h file
@property (nonatomic, strong) Class actionSheetClass;

// in the .m file
// after button is pressed...
self.actionSheetClass actionSheet = [[self.actionSheetClass alloc] init...];

This is a very unnatural way of writing code - one of those times when you twist your code out of shape just to make it testable. I get better test coverage at the expense of readability. I'd rather have my cake, eat it, and then bake some more cake and eat that too.

Does anyone know how I can test my UIActionSheet-based behaviour without resorting to such shenanigans?

Update

After Michał Ciuba's comment, I started exploring how I can use OCMock to test all the things I want to test. The problem with the approach in that thread is that the number of buttons cannot be tested, neither can their actions. The culprit is the nil-terminated argument list. Even with all the acrobatics that the Objective-C runtime makes possible, it's actually impossible to test the buttons and their actions.

This is why:

1. You can't show an action sheet because your tests don't have a view that is being displayed. So if the view controller uses some code like -(void) showActionSheet { UIActionSheet* actionSheet = [[UIActionSheet alloc] initWith...]; [actionSheet showInView:self.view]; } That is to say, if it doesn't hold a reference to its action sheet, you also won't be able to get a reference to the action sheet in your tests without some mocking. No reference, no checking buttons.

2. You can't stub the initWithTitle:delegate:cancelButtonTitle:destructiveButtonTitle:otherButtonTitles: method and check its arguments because of the nil-terminated arguments.

3. I tried to use Peter Steinberger's Aspects library to add an "after hook" to the that method, but the nil-terminated arguments again cause problems here because Aspects uses NSInvocation to pass the message onto the original method, which means attempting to access anything past the first item in a variable argument list will cause an EXC_BAD_ACCESS.
4. Swizzling the init method? That might be an option but I haven't tried yet and won't have time to for a while.

Is that really worth the effort? Certainly not, but I think it should be testable and that it shouldn't take this much effort. It's definitely been educational.