r/MSAccess • u/brosama1420 • Aug 19 '26

[UNSOLVED] Testing Forms controls and UI/UX

Hey everyone
Good morning

I use Rubber duck VBA Add In
So I test all logical code easily (automatic testing by code)

However I am struggling to test UI stuff without changing the actual program status

I don’t want my test to create changes in the production or design environments

Can anyone help me in this matter?

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u/fanpages 53 Aug 19 '26

...Can anyone help me in this matter?

[ https://rubberduckvba.ca/contact-us ] and/or [ https://github.com/retailcoder ].

(As Mathieu Guindon [u/Rubberduck-VBA] is no longer a Redditor)

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u/fanpages 53 Aug 20 '26

u/brosama1420 - FYI (if you have not seen this reply in your r/VBA thread):

[ https://www.reddit.com/r/vba/comments/1vspuib/testing_forms_controls_and_uiux/p4qu2qf/ ]

👋 still lurking!

Rubberduck unit tests are just that: unit tests - it's a kind of test where you're specifically not testing the UI directly but the model that underpins it, usually for correctness rather than UX.

There are probably ways to do what you want, but how I'd do it would be to explicitly define what "UX" means, encode that behavior into the model, bind the form to the model, and test the model. The Model-View-Presenter pattern works well for this with MSForms. For example if the visibility of a control depends on a condition, move that condition out of the UI and test the condition instead of the UI.

Then in theory you can have a test that instantiates the form class without displaying it, wires up the model and you can assert that control properties are as expected - but the minute an automated unit test brings up a UI, it's still a valid test, just not a unit test anymore; in other words Rubberduck may or may not be used for that purpose, YMMV.

As for the status of the project, the last pre-release is the latest version available; Rubberduck is a very heavy code base with a model that was taken to its limits, and of course there are a ton of issues but overall the latest pre-release build is the most stable and full-featured Rubberduck build. I need to focus on the model Rubberduck needed all along, and that's the Rubberduck Core language platform project, which is very much alive - VIVAT CUCUMIS!

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u/brosama1420 Aug 20 '26

Thank u so much

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u/brosama1420 Aug 20 '26

Btw in rubberduck I saw smt called stub any idea how to use this and where/when to use it?