I'm having issues testing expected exceptions in coroutines on Android. Full MWE in the attached cod...

# coroutines

[Erik]

I'm having issues testing expected exceptions in coroutines on Android. Full MWE in the attached code snippet.

As far as I understand is that when a new coroutine is launched from a unit test, even if that indirectly happens on the TestCoroutineDispatcher or TestCoroutineScope, then any exceptions are swallowed (although the stack traces are printed). What is the general pattern to work with expected exceptions in unit tests and coroutines on Android?

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[Andrew]

I think if you wanted to test an expected exception you would use a suspend function and call that in the test. The launchSomething() you have is similar to what would be an event handler function which you would not be waiting for a result from and therefore not care what exception it throws.

[Andrew]

I am also not sure if Dispatchers.Main is really replaced by the test scope, its called from the test scope then the new scope becomes Dispatchers.Main when the exception is thrown.

[Erik]

That does make sense. Thanks!

[Erik]

I am sure that Dispatchers.Main is replaced in the tests dispatcher. I have verified this by simply printlnI(Dispatchers.Main), which prints some TestMainDispatcher@2812cbfa instance.

[Erik]

What is interesting, though, is that if I run that view model function that launches a crashing coroutine on the view model scope, then the app crashes. That's something I might want to verify.

[Erik]

But as expected: I cannot catch that exception anywhere but in the launched coroutine.
As per the docs (of course): https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/coroutines/exception-handling.html#exception-propagation

[Andrew]

I was learning some of this as I was trying to answer the question. It seems exceptions inside a coroutine are similar to ones that happen inside a 2nd thread, even if the coroutine is running on the same/main thread.

[Andrew]

Also it looks like if you want normal exception handling you would use await

[Erik]

I've chosen not to throw an exception, as it's a fire and forget (launch) coroutine. So my coroutine will now handle the exception by propagating that information through other mechanisms unrelated to coroutines and exceptions.