Faker: Take into account test duration when generating random dates

[Startouf]

Often I'm running tests without freezing time, and I need to generate a "time between" Time.now and some arbitrary time in the future, and make sure that the randomly selected time will not become a past time given the time of execution of the test (otherwise the test will be flaky).

FOr instance

Utility.some_range_between(Time.now, end_time) to always generate a time that would be future? at any point during my test (since my app code will actually compare such a date with Time.now to decide on some behavior)

Therefore I have selected an arbitrary test_max_duration (15.seconds for instance) and I have enhanced my own utility methods to return a random range to include this safety margin

def Utility.some_range_between(start_time, end_time)
  (start_time + TEST_MAXIMUM_DURATION)..(end_time - TEST_MAXIMUM_DURATION)
end

I'm wondering if this could be integrated into faker (maybe with some warning if the coder tries to request a random date within the TEST_MAXIMUM_DURATION to indicate it will be required to freeze time to avoid problems)

[stympy]

It seems to me like you should be freezing time in your tests if your tests are time-sensitive, rather than pushing that concern down to Faker. Let me know if you think there are other use-cases for the functionality, though.

[Zeragamba]

https://rubygems.org/gems/timecop is a good tool for testing with time, though some testing frameworks may get upset at it, so just use it where it's needed.