How to unit test code marked as (:background) in a Datafield project?

Any answer after 6 months? 

You would have to mock your external dependencies 

I wrote a blog about this a few years ago :  starttorun.info/.../

That's not a problem. I need to test that Communications.makeWebRequest won't run out of memory for any device with the given settings. For that I really need to run the makeWebRequest as it eats lots of memory and there's no way how to simulate it by the mock itself. 

TLDR; I can surely mock the Background, but I need to test the real makeWebRequest performance and impact within the limits of all supported devices. 

The performance on the simulator of the makewebrequest is not representative. It's much slower on the real device 

Unit tests do not have a memory limit

When I test stuff like the background, I just do it in the sim like any other app testing. Let the temporal events fire on their own, or use simulation>Background events to manually fire one.

Not sure you need to test every device with say a 32kb limit on the background, but a bigger variable may be if the size of the response can vary.

And as Peter says, you can't really judge the speed in the sim, as things do happen much faster than on a real device.

Things like this I test with sideloads, and not just for an hour or two.  But over days.

The speed does not bother me, just the memory. 

I need to cover next permutations: 

a) memory available to the device (obviously)

b) resolution of the device (higher resolution = bigger font = bigger memory impact) 

For a × b I'd like find out at any time when I reach the limit that crashes c) items loaded by makeWebrequest and returned by Background.exit that is specific to a) (stronger devices load more data). 

I can definitely set a finite set of a) b) c), but the problem is that even adding a new code eats from memory limits, so I'd like to have a test alerting me that I reached that limit on any combinations of a) b) c).

IMO, that kind of thing would be more properly described as an integration test, not a unit test.

And there isn't really a good way to do automated integration testing with CIQ afaik.

also as I mentioned before in this topic memory limits do not apply to unit test code (this feature was removed because otherwise you got out of memory just by adding new unit tests which is of course not desirable)

How to detect when the app is reaching (the tough) memory limits at any device then? 

That really is just using the sim and letting things run for a while.  Maybe using time simulation in the sim to check things like how various things fit based on the time.

As someone with a bunch of watch faces with and without a background service, I think you may be making this overly complex.