I wish there were an annotation `@ExistsForTesting...

# random

[Ellen Spertus]

I wish there were an annotation @ExistsForTesting not just @VisibleForTesting.

[russhwolf]

You can create your own via @RequiresOptIn and then opt-in only your test sources

[Shawn]

What’s the use case for @ExistsForTesting, anyhow?

[Shawn]

im also not so hot on @VisibleForTesting myself tbh

[Ellen Spertus]

@Shawn I often create a method just to facilitate testing, for example to facilitate dependency injection when a framework is inadequate…

[Ellen Spertus]

or to get information about private members, such as the size of a private hash map. Granted, that technically shouldn’t be a unit test, since those are about interfaces, but it’s useful for debugging and TDD.

[Shawn]

Yeah that definitely shouldn’t be part of a unit test lol

[Shawn]

my stance on it is that testing like that is brittle and often kinda misses the forest for the trees when it comes to behavioral testing

[Ellen Spertus]

@Shawn Fair enough about information about private fields.

[Shawn]

I’m also kinda curious what you mean by facilitating DI — ideally you’d just pass your mocks in to the constructor/factory and that’d be that, but that might not be the case if you’re doing field injection or some kind of lazy setting (also kind of a code smell imho, but still just my opinion)

[Ellen Spertus]

I’m having trouble mocking Android components in some cases. https://kotlinlang.slack.com/archives/C0B8M7BUY/p1584997003143100

[Shawn]

Ooh, interesting, that kinda looks like a Kotlin interop rough spot to me

[Shawn]

I don’t work with mixed java/kotlin codebases very often and never do Android development so I’m out of my element there

[Ellen Spertus]

I’m working on a prototype whose code is unlikely to be used for long (although I know those are famous last words) and am probably already over-engineering parts of it.

[Shawn]

although I know those are famous last words

too right lol

[Shawn]

i saw in the thread that someone recommended using mockk, hopefully that works out for y’all

[Ellen Spertus]

Thanks!

[Zach Klippenstein (he/him) [MOD]]

There’s a Jetbrains-specific annotation @TestOnly that is basically what you’re looking for, i think.
https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/annotating-source-code.html#bundled-annotations

[Drew Hamilton]

There's also @VisibleForTesting(otherwise = VisibleForTesting.NONE)

[Drew Hamilton]

Neither Mockito nor MockK can mock fields afaik. But I think you can just set fields on mocks as if they were normal (non-mock) instances

[Ellen Spertus]

Thanks, @Drew Hamilton, I’ll give that a try.

[Ellen Spertus]

@Drew Hamilton That seemed to work. Thanks again!