No One "Caught" It?
Posted on January 14, 2006 by Scott Leberknight
Apparently none of the <sarcasm>tons of people who read my blog</sarcasm> caught the fact that in my test failings part ii entry the test code is wrong. (I only caught it because I read that entry as I was writing abour validation in Rails.) If the line of code dao.findVisit(-9999L) executes without throwing any exception, then the test still passes! Just because the test method throws Exception and the try/catch only deals with HibernateObjectRetrievalFailureException does not mean the test fails when the findVisit method throws no exception at all. You still need to remember to call fail() if no exception is thrown, as the following shows.
public void testFindNonExistentVisit() throws Exception {
try {
dao.findVisit(-9999L);
fail("findVisit should have thrown an exception!"); // you do need this line!
}
catch (HibernateObjectRetrievalFailureException ex) {}
}
So even though all the ExceptionAssertionTemplate code is more verbose (hey, it's what you expect from Java developers, right?) it still ensures that you don't forget to add the call to fail() in your test methods. I don't think it's that much more verbose, and since I apparently cannot even get my code correct in a blog entry, it's probably a good idea to use it, or else I'll keep forgetting to call fail() and have my tests passing when they should fail.