that’s a tricky one and there’s an open issue abou...

# mockk

[Mattia Tommasone]

that’s a tricky one and there’s an open issue about it AFAIR.
The thing is mockk still needs to somehow instantiate an instance of the class and thus execute a constructor.
The bad answer to your question, then, is that ideally your constructors should not have side effects; a possible workaround could be to put them in a @PostConstruct method

[Patrick Ramsey]

Out of curiosity: why does mockk need to create an instance and then substitute it? From what I can tell, mockk() doesn’t have the same behavior, and just returns a mock instance of the targeted class without its real constructor having ever been called.

[Patrick Ramsey]

is it a limitation of kotlin?

[Patrick Ramsey]

and thanks.

[ephemient]

probably because mockk() is a function which is free to perform any proxy or objenesis magic it needs to achieve the result, but intercepting a constructor call is actually pretty difficult on the JVM, even more so than intercepting static calls

[ephemient]

@Patrick Ramsey if you need this feature, try contributing it to mockk. it does not have enough developers.

[Patrick Ramsey]

that’s good to know on both counts

[Patrick Ramsey]

and unfortunate. It’s a great tool.

[Patrick Ramsey]

I’ll keep that in mind.

[Patrick Ramsey]

thanks to you both

[Mattia Tommasone]

+1 on both @ephemient’s comments, i could use a hand 🙂

[Patrick Ramsey]

thank you for all your hard work!

[Mattia Tommasone]

the most requested feature atm is also related to constructors, btw, it’s about being able to mock specific constructors with different behaviors depending on the parameters they take

[Patrick Ramsey]

that, too, sounds both useful and like a giant pain to implement. 😆

[Patrick Ramsey]

and +1 on constructors not having side effects. Just trying to retrofit tests onto an existing codebase that’s in need of some improvement

[Patrick Ramsey]

thanks again all of you!

[christophsturm]

I think mockito can mock without calling constructors. (I read that it uses objenesis to create classes without constuctor invocation)

[Patrick Ramsey]

that was my memory as well, but it’s been a while

[Patrick Ramsey]

but I can massage things and accomplish what I want a different way I think.