Accessing/Reflecting/Mocking private type alias

[Donovan]

Hi,

I'm writing some unit tests which run code which depends on the Gorilla Web Toolkit. The tested code requires mux.Vars() to contain some values, but I don't want to invoke ServeHTTP() in these particular tests, which is where mux.Vars() is initialised. The nub of the problem lies with the fact that a private type alias exists in the mux package which is used as the type of the key for the DefaultContext:

Type alias:

http://code.google.com/p/gorilla/source/browse/mux/mux.go#220

mux.Vars() setting code

http://code.google.com/p/gorilla/source/browse/mux/mux.go#244

If I promote contextKey to exported as ContextKey I can get the correct behaviour with this code:

var vars = map[string]string{

"doctype": strconv.FormatUint(uint64(doctype), 10),

"docid":   strconv.FormatUint(uint64(docid), 10),

}

context.DefaultContext.Set(req, mux.ContextKey(0), vars)

but obviously this involves hacking a library package. Without getting Rodrigo to alter the mux API, is there another way I can circumvent this testing issue?

Cheers,

Donovan.