Try catch in a JUnit test

Question

I'm writing unit tests for an application that already exists for a long time. Some of the methods I need to test are build like this:

public void someMethod() throws Exception { 
   //do something 
}

If I want to test these methods I have to write something like this in my unit test:

@Test
public void someTest() {
   try {
      someMethod();
   }
   catch (Exception e) {
      e.printStackTrace();
   }
}

Is it a good practice to do this? Or is there an other way to test these methods?

I did some research on the internet and I found a few solutions with the @Rule annotation and @Test(expected=Exception.class), but that's not working (Eclipse keeps showing the someMethod() line in the test as wrong). I don't know if these are good solutions, because I'm pretty new to the whole unit testing story.

If someone who knows a lot about this could help me out, I would be really thankful.

Answer 1

Since Exception is a checked exception, you either:

• Have to catch the exception in a try...catch statement, or
• Declare the exception to be thrown in the method itself.

What you have up there works fine, but my personal preference is to declare the exception to be thrown. This way, if an exception I'm not expecting is thrown during the run of the test, the test will fail.

@Test
public void someTest() throws Exception {
    // dodgy code here
}

If we need to see if a specific exception is thrown, then you have the option of using @Rule or adding the value to the @Test annotation directly.

@Test(expected = FileNotFoundException.class)
public void someTest() throws Exception {
    // dodgy code here
}

In JUnit 5, you can leverage Assertions.assertThrows to accomplish the same thing. I'm less familiar with this overall since it's not yet GA at the time of editing, but it appears to accept an Executable coming from JUnit 5.

@Test
public void someTest() {
    assertThrows(FileNotFoundException.class, () ->
         { dodgyService.breakableMethod() };
}