Mockito: How to mock an interface of JodaTime

Question

I use JodaTime#DateTime, and I need to mock its behavior. Since it is not possible to directly mock JodaTime#DateTime, I create an interface of it<

Answer 1

This is a classic case of testing showing up a potential flaw in design. You cannot mock JodaTime because you have a hard-wired dependency to these classes in your class-under-test.

Have a look at the SOLID principles to understand why this could be a problem (especially in this case the Dependency Inversion Principle). If you injected JodaTime somewhere as a dependency, then in your unit test you would be able to replace a real instace of it with a mock, stub or spy as appropriate.

However: JodaTime is something that is highly unlikely to be injected with anything else in the production environment, no matter how long it is live for. Instead, in this case you would probably be better served with the Composed Method Design Pattern. Here, you would extract whatever calculation/algorithm you use to generate the printjobName to another method (I can't see how you do it here because your code snippet never assigns a value to that variable). Then you can spy (partial mock) your class under test to only mock that method and return a fixed value, regardless of the real date time that JodaTime is delivering, for instance:

public class PrintProcessor {
    ...
    public String getPrintJobName(Shipper shipper) {
        String printJobName = null;
        String timeHash = this.getTimeHash();
        if (this.isBeforeFourPM()) {
            switch(shipper) {
                printJobName = // Do something with timeHash to generate name
            }
        } else {
            ...
        }
        return printJobName;
    }

    public boolean isBeforeFourPM() {
        return (jodaTime.getCurrentDateTimeEST().isBefore(jodaTime.getFourPM_EST()) ||
            jodaTime.getCurrentDateTimeEST().isAfter(jodaTime.getSevenPM_EST()));
    }

    public String getTimeHash() {
        ... // Do something to hash the time value in to a String
    }
}

Now you can write in your test:

@Test
public void testGetPrintJobNameBeforeFourPM() {
    PrintProcessor concretePrintProcessor = new PrintProcessor();
    PrintProcessor printProcessor = spy(concretePrintProcessor);
    doReturn(true).when(printProcessor).isBeforeFourPM();

    String printJobName = printProcessor.getPrintJobName(Shipper.X);

    assertEquals("XNCRMNCF", printJobName);
}