JUnit 4.11 - What's new? Rules

JUnit 4.11 is a major release of the popular testing framework. Amongst the things I contributed were changes to @Rule and @ClassRule, to allow these annotations to be used on a method as well as a public field. I wanted this because I use Rules heavily in Java, and I wanted to be able to use them in Scala as well. Mainly to make the transition from Java to Scala easier.

Let’s take an example:

public class JavaRuleTest {
  @Rule public ExpectedException expectedException = ExpectedException.none();
 
  @Test
  public void test() {
    expectedException.expect(NumberFormatException.class);
    Integer.valueOf("foo");
  }
}

So this test uses the ExpectedException rule which allows you to say that you expect to receive an exception, in this case a NumberFormatException. Which we do. So the test passes. If we translate this directly to Scala, we get:

class ScalaRuleTest {
  @Rule val expectedException = ExpectedException.none()
 
  @Test def test() {
    expectedException.expect(classOf[NumberFormatException])
    Integer.valueOf("foo")
  }
}

But this produces an error:

The @Rule 'expectedException' must be public.

Although we’re defining a ‘public’ field expectedException, Scala implements this as a private field with an accessor method. So JUnit expects a public field, but finds a private one; the test fails. But now, with JUnit 4.11, we can apply a @Rule to a method:

class ScalaRuleTest {
  val expectedException = ExpectedException.none()
 
  @Rule def expectedExceptionDef = expectedException
 
  @Test def test() {
    expectedException.expect(classOf[NumberFormatException])
    Integer.valueOf("foo")
  }
}

We still need the val expectedException, so that we can refer to it in test(), but we add expectedExceptionDef and move the @Rule annotation to there. And now the test passes.

Similarly, for @ClassRule, you can do the same, but Scala doesn’t have static variables/methods, so you’ll need to add it to the companion object:

object ScalaClassRuleTest {
  @ClassRule def externalResource = new ExternalResource() {
 protected override def before() = println("before")
 protected override def after() = println("after")
  }
}

class ScalaClassRuleTest {
  @Test def test() {
 System.out.println("a test")
  }
}

This change allows me to take my Java code and translate it (almost) directly into Scala, as a stepping stone to rewriting everything completely to use Scalatest or Specs2. Also, other Java programmers may find it useful :-)