In the earlier post we saw how we could partly mock classes and its private methods using PowerMocks. Today I will demonstrate how we could suppress a constructor and a method.
Now you must be thinking why the hell would I every want to do that! Well believe me there are cases where you would want to do that :) And we are about to have a look at one
Code under test:
Now you understand why we might need to suppress a constructor? Well as we can see in the above code class LegacyCustomer's constructor simply throws RuntimeException (this is just a place holder. In real world it might do some complicated operation may be loads a native library, establishes a connection to the db god knows what all it can do!). Customer class extends LegacyCustomer class to add some more behavior to it (I am so making it up!). In real life, I would never write such code. Believe me!
But lets assume for now that we want to write a test case to verify that, when the Customer object is created it sets the email field to the value passed as argument.
So how do we test this?
How will we test it - How do they do it!:
We can easily suppress the constructor of LegacyCustomer class.
"Suppress a constructor" means that the code in the constructor will not be called and thats exactly what we want. The syntax to do that is
Lets read the above line in English.
Suppress the constructor of LegacyCustomer class which takes one argument of String type. Nice job!This is step 1 of the process.
Now, if you think for a moment, base class constructor will be invoked automatically when derived class instance is created right! Hence, in this case LegacyCustomer class's constructor will be invoked as soon as we create an instance of Customer class.
We dont want that to happen!
We want to suppress the call to the constructor of LegacyCustomer class. So we will have to change the byte code of Customer class and tell it not to invoke the Constructor of LegacyCustomer class.
How do we do that? Well, you know the answer to that using the following line of code
PowerMocks is happy to do the all byte code manipulation for us, we just need to tell it to do so. This is done via our very own @PrepareForTest annotation.
So lets look at the entire test case
Simple?
Want more?
What if, I wanted to test a method in Customer class that actually invokes another method that does some complicated stuff?
Lets look at the code to test:
Well its basically the same code as above we have just added the getNetAssetValue method to the Customer class and we want to test this method.
How do we test it - How do they do it!
One way to do that is of-course by using spy and then stubbing the private method.
The other way is to suppress the call to doSomeComplexCalculation method. What is the syntax for doing that?
Again, lets try to read the above syntax in English language.
Suppress the method of Customer class whose name is doSomeComplexCalculation.Nice!
Lets look at the complete test case
That's all folks!
Looks like now we know how to suppress any constructor or a method! Well, what if we wanted to test some method in LegacyCustomer class? Remember the LegacyCustomer class constructor throws a RuntimeException.
Hummmm, that's interesting how can we suppress the constructor of class under test. Turns out there are two ways of doing it. One of the way is what we have just seen, using the suppress method. Will show the other way in the next post.
Till then, Have Fun with PowerMocks!
