Friday, February 27, 2009

Mockito: Most helpful stacktrace

One of the things I have admired about the Spring framework is its helpful error messages. Yeah, of all the things I could point to, I picked that....However, work with me here. What I mean is that when things go wrong when using Spring, it spits out error messages that are full sentences that make sense and point the developer in the proper direction. None of the NoClassDefFoundError but not telling who which freaking class.

Now, I think Mockito -- the Java mocking framework -- has taken over the mantle of "King of error messages". Earlier today I had a new unit test I had just written fail. I didn't have to dig too much to find the error because Mockito pointed the way with the following stacktrace.

org.mockito.exceptions.misusing.UnfinishedStubbingException:
Unifinished stubbing detected!
E.g. toReturn() may be missing.
Examples of correct stubbing:
when(mock.isOk()).thenReturn(true);
when(mock.isOk()).thenThrow(exception);
doThrow(exception).when(mock).someVoidMethod();
Also make sure the method is not final - you cannot stub final methods.
at
etc. etc.

How cool is that! Hats off, Mockito-team. This developer appreciates the extra few minutes you took to put together that message. It helped me immensely.

2 comments:

  1. oh wow. A *helpful* erorr message? Wow!

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  2. I beg to differ: I had the same error message, but none of the mentioned was wrong! In this case, it's more confusing than helpful...
    However, my problem was an inline method call inside when(), and this was not specified to be forbidden.

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