DDevelopment & Design

A Mockito catch

Suppose we have such classes and interfaces

public class AddOrganizationAction implements Action {}
public class AddPersonToOrganizationAction implements Action {}
*
*
public interface DispatchAsync {
     void execute( Action action, AsyncCallback callback );
}

We’re using the best mocking framework ;) Suppose we want to verify that code under test will call* execute()* with proper Action – AddOrganizationAction.
I found that many developers (including me!) check such condition with

verify(async).execute(any(AddOrganizationAction.class), any(AsyncCallback.class));

In such case *AsyncCallback *is not important for us. We just want to ensure that *AddOrganizationAction *will be passed. We run test and it’s green. But suddenly if we put the code below into test it will be green too!

verify(async).execute(any(AddPersonToOrganizationAction .class), any(AsyncCallback.class));

Why? Because any() matcher doesn’t check the instance of passed object to be equal to declared class (AddOrganizationAction in this case). Any() checks if passed object conforms to method signature. In this case any Action‘s child will do. And we have an erroneous test!
The proper matcher we’d like to use is isA() matcher that checks if passed object is instance of declared class (which means instance of class or it’s children).

So the proper test should contain

verify(async).execute(isA(AddOrganizationAction.class), any(AsyncCallback.class));

Go now and search for any() usages and think about changing it to* isA()*. In 1 of 10 cases whenever I change all tests in a testcase to isA() usage, I find an error in implementation of logic under test. Luckily I know the catch and now you do :)

Ok. It’s not really a catch but ignorance of all us developers that we don’t read entire documentantation :)

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DDevelopment & Design

Thought static method can’t be easy to mock, stub nor track? Wrong!

No matter why, no matter is it a good idea. Sometimes one just wants to check or it's necessary to be done. Mock a static method, woot? Impossibru!

In pure Java world it is still a struggle. But Groovy allows you to do that really simple. Well, not groovy alone, but with a great support of Spock.

Lets move on straight to the example. To catch some context we have an abstract for the example needs. A marketing project with a set of offers. One to many.

import spock.lang.Specification

class OfferFacadeSpec extends Specification {

    OfferFacade facade = new OfferFacade()

    def setup() {
        GroovyMock(Project, global: true)
    }

    def 'delegates an add offer call to the domain with proper params'() {
        given:
            Map params = [projId: projectId, name: offerName]

        when:
            Offer returnedOffer = facade.add(params)

        then:
            1 * Project.addOffer(projectId, _) >> { projId, offer -> offer }
            returnedOffer.name == params.name

        where:
            projectId | offerName
            1         | 'an Offer'
            15        | 'whasup!?'
            123       | 'doskonała oferta - kup teraz!'
    }
}
So we test a facade responsible for handling "add offer to the project" call triggered  somewhere in a GUI.
We want to ensure that static method Project.addOffer(long, Offer) will receive correct params when java.util.Map with user form input comes to the facade.add(params).
This is unit test, so how Project.addOffer() works is out of scope. Thus we want to stub it.

The most important is a GroovyMock(Project, global: true) statement.
What it does is modifing Project class to behave like a Spock's mock. 
GroovyMock() itself is a method inherited from Specification.  The global flag is necessary to enable mocking static methods.
However when one comes to the need of mocking static method, author of Spock Framework advice to consider redesigning of implementation. It's not a bad advice, I must say.

Another important thing are assertions at then: block. First one checks an interaction, if the Project.addOffer() method was called exactly once, with a 1st argument equal to the projectId and some other param (we don't have an object instance yet to assert anything about it).
Right shit operator leads us to the stub which replaces original method implementation by such statement.
As a good stub it does nothing. The original method definition has return type Offer. The stub needs to do the same. So an offer passed as the 2nd argument is just returned.
Thanks to this we can assert about name property if it's equal with the value from params. If no return was designed the name could be checked inside the stub Closure, prefixed with an assert keyword.

Worth of  mentioning is that if you want to track interactions of original static method implementation without replacing it, then you should try using GroovySpy instead of GroovyMock.

Unfortunately static methods declared at Java object can't be treated in such ways. Though regular mocks and whole goodness of Spock can be used to test pure Java code, which is awesome anyway :)No matter why, no matter is it a good idea. Sometimes one just wants to check or it's necessary to be done. Mock a static method, woot? Impossibru!

In pure Java world it is still a struggle. But Groovy allows you to do that really simple. Well, not groovy alone, but with a great support of Spock.

Lets move on straight to the example. To catch some context we have an abstract for the example needs. A marketing project with a set of offers. One to many.

import spock.lang.Specification

class OfferFacadeSpec extends Specification {

    OfferFacade facade = new OfferFacade()

    def setup() {
        GroovyMock(Project, global: true)
    }

    def 'delegates an add offer call to the domain with proper params'() {
        given:
            Map params = [projId: projectId, name: offerName]

        when:
            Offer returnedOffer = facade.add(params)

        then:
            1 * Project.addOffer(projectId, _) >> { projId, offer -> offer }
            returnedOffer.name == params.name

        where:
            projectId | offerName
            1         | 'an Offer'
            15        | 'whasup!?'
            123       | 'doskonała oferta - kup teraz!'
    }
}
So we test a facade responsible for handling "add offer to the project" call triggered  somewhere in a GUI.
We want to ensure that static method Project.addOffer(long, Offer) will receive correct params when java.util.Map with user form input comes to the facade.add(params).
This is unit test, so how Project.addOffer() works is out of scope. Thus we want to stub it.

The most important is a GroovyMock(Project, global: true) statement.
What it does is modifing Project class to behave like a Spock's mock. 
GroovyMock() itself is a method inherited from Specification.  The global flag is necessary to enable mocking static methods.
However when one comes to the need of mocking static method, author of Spock Framework advice to consider redesigning of implementation. It's not a bad advice, I must say.

Another important thing are assertions at then: block. First one checks an interaction, if the Project.addOffer() method was called exactly once, with a 1st argument equal to the projectId and some other param (we don't have an object instance yet to assert anything about it).
Right shit operator leads us to the stub which replaces original method implementation by such statement.
As a good stub it does nothing. The original method definition has return type Offer. The stub needs to do the same. So an offer passed as the 2nd argument is just returned.
Thanks to this we can assert about name property if it's equal with the value from params. If no return was designed the name could be checked inside the stub Closure, prefixed with an assert keyword.

Worth of  mentioning is that if you want to track interactions of original static method implementation without replacing it, then you should try using GroovySpy instead of GroovyMock.

Unfortunately static methods declared at Java object can't be treated in such ways. Though regular mocks and whole goodness of Spock can be used to test pure Java code, which is awesome anyway :)
DDevelopment & Design

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