Skip to main content

A simple way to mock objects without using mock unit testing framework

When writing unit test, there are some cases that I have to mock objects:
  1. It makes sense to mock provided objects by libraries (APIs) such as FacesContext (JSF) because of no real environment running.
  2. It makes sense to mock a lower layer objects and it is already tested, for example: mocking Dao layer objects when testing Service layer (Service calls Dao).
At beginning I was aware of Mockito (a mocking framework) in order to overcome the issue. And currently, I am interested in another way like an alternative because it looks more simple. That is just create mock objects manually and just do anything we want. I've just known this approach from Primefaces' source code. :)

Follow my simple example below and we can see what different from these 2 ways are:

I have an interface Foo and a class Bar

public interface Foo {
    String greet();
}

public class Bar {
    public String greet(Foo foo){
        return foo.greet();
    }
}

Using Mockito example:

public class MockitoExampleTest {
    private Foo foo;
    
    @Before
    public void setup(){
        foo = Mockito.mock(Foo.class);
        Mockito.when(foo.greet()).thenReturn("Hello world!");
    }
   
    @Test
    public void barGreets(){
        Bar bar = new Bar();
        Assert.assertEquals(bar.greet(foo), "Hello world!");
    }
}

Simple mock example:

public class FooMock implements Foo {

    public String greet() {
        return "Hello world!";
    }

}

public class SimpleMockExampleTest {
    private Foo foo;
   
    @Before
    public void setup(){
        foo = new FooMock();
    }
   
    @Test
    public void barGreets(){
        Bar bar = new Bar();
        Assert.assertEquals(bar.greet(foo), "Hello world!");
    }
}

The following is Primefaces' test code that shows the same idea above:

FacesContext context = new FacesContextMock(attributes); 
context.setViewRoot(new UIViewRoot());

References:
[1]. https://examples.javacodegeeks.com/core-java/mockito/mockito-hello-world-example/ 
[2]. https://github.com/primefaces/primefaces

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Creating a Chatbot with RiveScript in Java

Motivation "Artificial Intelligence (AI) is considered a major innovation that could disrupt many things. Some people even compare it to the Internet. A large investor firm predicted that some AI startups could become the next Apple, Google or Amazon within five years"   - Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University. Using chatbots to support our daily tasks is super useful and interesting. In fact, "Jenkins CI, Jira Cloud, and Bitbucket" have been becoming must-have apps in Slack of my team these days. There are some existing approaches for chatbots including pattern matching, algorithms, and neutral networks. RiveScript is a scripting language using "pattern matching" as a simple and powerful approach for building up a Chabot. Architecture Actually, it was flexible to choose a programming language for the used Rivescript interpreter like Java, Go, Javascript, Python, and Perl. I went with Java. Used Technologies and Tools Oracle JDK 1.8...

AngularJS - Build a custom validation directive for using multiple emails in textarea

AngularJS already supports the built-in validation with text input with type email. Something simple likes the following: <input name="input" ng-model="email.text" required="" type="email" /> <span class="error" ng-show="myForm.input.$error.email"> Not valid email!</span> However, I used a text area and I wanted to enter some email addresses that's saparated by a comma (,). I had a short research and it looked like AngualarJS has not supported this functionality so far. Therefore, I needed to build a custom directive that I could add my own validation functions. My validation was done only on client side, so I used the $validators object. Note that, there is the $asyncValidators object which handles asynchronous validation, such as making an $http request to the backend. This is just my implementation on my project. In order to understand that, I supposed you already had experiences with ...

Attribute 'for' of label component with id xxxx is not defined

I got the warning in the log file when I have used the tag <h:outputLabel> without attribute " for " in xhtml file. It was really polluting my server log files. The logged information actually makes sense anyway! We could find an answer as the following: "Having h:outputLabel without a "for" attribute is meaningless. If you are not attaching the label, you should be using h:outputText instead of h:outputLabel." However, these solutions are not possible just for my situation. Instead of using h:outputText for only displaying text, my team has used h:outputLabel too many places. We were nearly in our release time (next day) so it is quite risky and takes much efforts if we try to correct it. Because the style (with CSS) is already done with h:ouputLabel . The alternative by adding attribute " for " the existing h:outputLabel is not reasonable either. I really need to find another solution. Fortunately, I came across a way if I cha...

DevOps for Dummies

Everyone talks about it, but not everyone knows what it is. Why DevOps? In general, whenever an organization adopts any new technology, methodology, or approach, that adoption has to be driven by a business need. Any kind of system that need rapid delivery of innovation requires DevOps (development and operations). Why? DevOps requires mechanisms to get fast feedback from all the stakeholders in the software application that's being delivered. DevOps approaches to reduce waste and rework and to shift resources to higher-value activities. DevOps aims to deliver value (of organization or project) faster and more efficiently. DevOps Capabilities The capabilities that make up DevOps are a broad set that span the software delivery life cycle. The following picture is a reference architecture which provides a template of a proven solution by using a set of preferred methods and capabilities. My Remarks Okay, that sounds cool. What does it simply mean, again? The f...

4 Remarkable Notes for JSF Apps Using HTML5

In the previous post , I've already shared with you how my team consults clients by using a HTML prototype. This post is about the used technologies for reusing the provided HTML template and communicating with backend. What is the issue when using HTML elements with Primefaces components? Primefaces is a great extension for developing JSF web apps. However, it is really frustrating in case we have to make it work with an existing HTML template. Why? - Primefaces has its own theme for styling. - Primefaces changes the HTML structure. Therefore, that would be a huge effort to use the Primefaces' components to replicate the elements of the HTML template; especially it is impossible for images drawing by " canvas " tag. That requires us to find a better approach. Since Java EE 7 (introducing JSF 2.2 included), it supports to use HTML5 elements . The idea is that JSF components don't effect the style and HTML structure, so we can easily reuse the provided HTM...