Writing and testing convenience methods using Java 8 Date/Time classes

Question

I have some old convenience methods, written using Calendars, that I want to update to use the Java.time.* classes introduced in Java 8. Some of the methods in my class get

Answer 1

In your test (and only during test!) set the clock that your convenience class uses so that you can predict the desired/expected results independently of the computer clock:

public class ConvenienceTest {

    @Test
    public void testGetLocalHour() {
        Convenience underTest = new Convenience();

        ZoneId zone = ZoneId.of("America/Los_Angeles");

        ZonedDateTime fixedZdt = ZonedDateTime.now(zone).withHour(0);
        underTest.setClock(Clock.fixed(fixedZdt.toInstant(), zone));
        assertEquals("24", underTest.getLocalHour24HourClock());

        fixedZdt = fixedZdt.withHour(1);
        underTest.setClock(Clock.fixed(fixedZdt.toInstant(), zone));
        assertEquals("01", underTest.getLocalHour24HourClock());

        fixedZdt = fixedZdt.withHour(23);
        underTest.setClock(Clock.fixed(fixedZdt.toInstant(), zone));
        assertEquals("23", underTest.getLocalHour24HourClock());

        // TODO test with other time zones
    }

}

For this to work it of course requires that your convenience class can accept a Clock and uses it:

public class Convenience {

    private Clock clock = Clock.systemDefaultZone();

    /** For testing only. Sets the clock from which to get the time. */
    void setClock(Clock clockForTest) {
        this.clock  = clockForTest;
    }

    public String getLocalHour24HourClock() {
        DateTimeFormatter fmt = DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("kk");
        ZonedDateTime zdt = ZonedDateTime.now(clock);
        return zdt.format(fmt);
    }

}

With this implementation the tests just passed on my computer.

Stepping a step back: if your convenience methods are but a thin layer on top of java.time, you may start to consider how much value a unit test has. If it is doing some real work (like formatting in the above example, something that regularly goes wrong), a test is valuable, but if a method just returns a value from a single call into java.time, you may not need a test. You shouldn’t test java.time, preferably only your own code.