A Short Story of Apex Unit testing

Imagine you’re preparing a small party and you need to make sure everything is set before your guests arrive. In the Salesforce world, that’s like setting up a unit test for our BatchMaskAction class. We want to ensure our batch job tidies up our Actions__c records just as we planned.

Here’s how we’ll do it:

1. Prep the Place: We’ll create a few Actions__c records as our “party setup”. Think of these as decorations and snacks. We need these to see if our batch job does its cleaning magic right.
2. Start the Party: Next, we’ll kick things off with Test.startTest(), invite our BatchMaskAction job to the scene with Database.executeBatch(batchJob), and wrap up with Test.stopTest(). This makes sure our job runs during the party and not after everyone’s gone home.
3. Check the Cleanup: After the batch job has done its thing, we’ll look around to see if our Actions__c records are as clean as we expected. Each Description__c and Resolution_Comments__c should be shiny and new, just like we hoped.

Here’s a simplified script that gets this done:

@isTest
private class TestBatchMaskAction {
    static testMethod void makeSureOurPartyRocks() {
        // Prep the place with some Actions__c records
        List<Actions__c> prepList = new List<Actions__c>();
        for(Integer i = 0; i < 3; i++) {
            prepList.add(new Actions__c(
                Description__c = 'Before Party Desc ' + i,
                Resolution_Comments__c = 'Before Party Comments ' + i
            ));
        }
        insert prepList;

        // Start the party and run the cleanup crew
        Test.startTest();
        BatchMaskAction batchJob = new BatchMaskAction();
        Database.executeBatch(batchJob);
        Test.stopTest();

        // Check the cleanup
        List<Actions__c> aftermathCheck = [SELECT Id, Description__c, Resolution_Comments__c FROM Actions__c];
        for(Actions__c a : aftermathCheck) {
            System.assert(a.Description__c.startsWith('Description '), 'Uh oh, the description didn't get cleaned up.');
            System.assert(a.Resolution_Comments__c.startsWith('Resolution Comments '), 'Oops, the comments are still messy.');
        }
    }
}

And there you have it—a friendly and simplified way to ensure our BatchMaskAction does its job correctly, keeping our Actions__c records neat and tidy.