annotation to make a private method public only for test classes

java unit-testing junit annotations
Kumetix picture Kumetix · Aug 2, 2011 · Viewed 137.1k times · Source

Who has a solution for that common need.

I have a class in my application.

some methods are public, as they are part of the api, and some are private, as they for internal use of making the internal flow more readable

now, say I want to write a unit test, or more like an integration test, which will be located in a different package, which will be allowed to call this method, BUT, I want that normal calling to this method will not be allowed if you try to call it from classes of the application itself

so, I was thinking about something like that

public class MyClass {

   public void somePublicMethod() {
    ....
   }

   @PublicForTests
   private void somePrivateMethod() {
    ....
   }
}

The annotation above will mark the private method as "public for tests" which means, that compilation and runtime will be allowed for any class which is under the test... package , while compilation and\or runtime will fail for any class which is not under the test package.

any thoughts? is there an annotation like this? is there a better way to do this?

it seems that the more unit tests you write, to more your inforced to break your encapsulation...

Answer

JB Nizet picture JB Nizet · Aug 2, 2011

The common way is to make the private method protected or package-private and to put the unit test for this method in the same package as the class under test.

Guava has a @VisibleForTesting annotation, but it's only for documentation purposes.

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