How to use filterStackTrace method of org.mockito.exceptions.base.MockitoSerializationIssue class

Well, the common approach to data storage in Java is, as you noted, not at all very object-oriented. This is in and of itself neither bad nor good: "object-orientedness" is neither an advantage nor disadvantage, it's just one of many paradigms, that sometimes helps with good architecture design (and sometimes not).

The reason DAOs in Java aren't usually object-oriented is exactly what you want to achieve – relaxing your dependency on the database. In a better-designed language, that allowed for multiple inheritances, this, of course, can be done very elegantly in an object-oriented way, but with Java, it just seems to be more troublesome than it is worth.

In a broader sense, the non-OO approach helps decouple your application-level data from the way it is stored. This is more than (non-)dependency on the specifics of a particular database, but also the storage schemas, which is especially important when using relational databases (don't get me started on ORM): you can have a well-designed relational schema seamlessly translated into the application OO model by your DAO.

So, what most DAOs are in Java nowadays are essentially what you mentioned in the beginning – classes, full of static methods. One difference is that, instead of making all the methods static, it is better to have a single static "factory method" (probably, in a different class), that returns a (singleton) instance of your DAO, which implements a particular interface, used by application code to access the database:

public interface GreatDAO {
    User getUser(int id);
    void saveUser(User u);
}
public class TheGreatestDAO implements GreatDAO {
   protected TheGreatestDAO() {}
   ... 
}
public class GreatDAOFactory {
     private static GreatDAO dao = null;
     protected static synchronized GreatDao setDAO(final GreatDAO d) {
         final GreatDAO old = dao;
         dao = d;
         return old;
     }
     public static synchronized GreatDAO getDAO() {
         return dao == null ? dao = new TheGreatestDAO() : dao;
     }
}

public class App {
     void setUserName(final int id, final String name) {
          final GreatDAO dao =  GreatDAOFactory.getDao();
          final User u = dao.getUser(id);
          u.setName(name);
          dao.saveUser(u);
     }
}

Why do it this way as opposed to static methods? Well, what if you do decide to switch to a different database? Naturally, you'd create a new DAO class, implementing the logic for your new storage. If you were using static methods, you would now have to go through all your code, accessing the DAO, and change it to use your new class, right? This could be a huge pain. And what if then you change your mind and want to switch back to the old DB?

With this approach, all you need to do is to change the GreatDAOFactory.getDAO() and make it create an instance of a different class, and all your application code will be using the new database without any changes.

In real life, this is often done without any changes to the code at all: the factory method gets the implementation class name via a property setting, and instantiates it using reflection, so, all you need to do to switch implementations is to edit a property file. There are actually frameworks – like spring or guice – that manage this "dependency injection" mechanism for you, but I won't go into details, first, because it is really beyond the scope of your question, and also, because I am not necessarily convinced that the benefit you get from using those frameworks is worth the trouble integrating with them for most applications.

Another (probably, more likely to be taken advantage of) benefit of this "factory approach" as opposed to "static" is testability. Imagine that you are writing a unit test that should test the logic of your App class independently of any underlying DAO. You don't want it to use any real underlying storage for several reasons (speed, having to set it up, and clean up afterwards, possible collisions with other tests, the possibility of polluting test results with problems in DAO, unrelated to App, which is actually being tested, etc.).

To do this, you want a test framework, like Mockito, that allows you to "mock out" the functionality of any object or method, replacing it with a "dummy" object, with predefined behavior (I'll skip the details, because, this again is beyond the scope). So, you can create this dummy object replacing your DAO, and make the GreatDAOFactory return your dummy instead of the real thing by calling GreatDAOFactory.setDAO(dao) before the test (and restoring it after). If you were using static methods instead of the instance class, this would not be possible.

One more benefit, which is kinda similar to switching databases I described above is "pimping up" your DAO with additional functionality. Suppose that your application becomes slower as the amount of data in the database grows, and you decide that you need a cache layer. Implement a wrapper class, that uses the real DAO instance (provided to it as a constructor parameter) to access the database, and caches the objects it reads in memory so that they can be returned faster. You can then make your GreatDAOFactory.getDAO instantiate this wrapper, for the application to take advantage of it.

(This is called "delegation pattern" … and seems like a pain in the butt, especially when you have lots of methods defined in your DAO: you will have to implement all of them in the wrapper, even to alter behavior of just one. Alternatively, you could simply subclass your DAO, and add caching to it this way. This would be a lot less boring coding upfront, but may become problematic when you do decide to change the database, or, worse, to have an option of switching implementations back and forth.)

One equally broadly used (but, in my opinion, inferior) alternative to the "factory" method is making the dao a member variable in all classes that need it:

public class App {
   GreatDao dao;
   public App(final GreatDao d) { dao = d; }
}

This way, the code that instantiates these classes needs to instantiate the DAO object (which could still use the factory) and provide it as a constructor parameter. The dependency injection frameworks I mentioned above, usually do something similar to this.

This provides all the benefits of the "factory method" approach, that I described earlier, but, as I said, is not as good in my opinion. The disadvantages here are having to write a constructor for each of your app classes, doing the same exact thing over, and over, also not being able to instantiate the classes easily when needed, and some lost readability: with a large enough code base, a reader of your code, not familiar with it, will have hard time understanding which actual implementation of the DAO is used, how it is instantiated, whether it is a singleton, a thread-safe implementation, whether it keeps state, or caches anything, how the decisions on choosing a particular implementation are made etc.

The following code works for me - when(mockRestTemplate.postForEntity(anyString(), any(), eq(String.class))).thenReturn(response);

Caused by: org.mockito.exceptions.base.MockitoException: Checked exception is invalid for this method! Invalid: java.net.ConnectException: Test exception

As stated by the exception message (and told in comments), you have to throw a RestClientException, not a ConnectException:

Mockito.when(restOperations.exchange(
        Mockito.anyString(), Mockito.<HttpMethod>any(), Mockito.<HttpEntity<?>>any(),
        Mockito.<Class<UserByRoleHolder>>any())).thenThrow(new RestClientException("Test exception"));

You get this error message, because the method exchange declares no thrown exception and ConnectException is a checked exception (i.e. must be declared when thrown).

Here is a solution that will work for you particular case:

First of all you need to create a PersonMixin since you cannot add the required annotations to the mock.

import com.fasterxml.jackson.annotation.JsonAutoDetect;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.annotation.JsonProperty;


@JsonAutoDetect(getterVisibility = JsonAutoDetect.Visibility.NONE, isGetterVisibility = JsonAutoDetect.Visibility.NONE)
public interface PersonMixin {

    @JsonProperty
    String getName();

    @JsonProperty
    Integer getAge();
}

Now, use the object mapper like the in following code and you will get the same result as when you serialize the real object:

Person mockPerson = mock(Person.class);
when(mockPerson.getName()).thenReturn(name);
when(mockPerson.getAge()).thenReturn(age);
objectMapper.addMixInAnnotations(Person.class, PersonMixin.class);
try {
    System.out.println(objectMapper.writeValueAsString(mockPerson));
} catch (JsonProcessingException e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
    System.err.println("Failed to serialize mock object.");
}

@Spy and @InjectMocks cannot be used well together (see Google Code issue #489 and GitHub issue #169), and for what they do it is not clear or common that they should be used together at all. In well-written Mockito usage, you generally should not even want to apply them to the same object.

• @InjectMocks works as a sort of stand-in dependency injection for the system under test: If you have a test that defines a @Mock or @Spy of the right type, Mockito will initialize any fields in your @InjectMocks instance with the contents of those test fields. This might be handy if you haven't otherwise structured your system-under-test for dependency injection (or if you use a DI framework that does field injection) and you want to replace those dependencies with mocks. It can be pretty fragile—unmatched fields will be silently ignored and will remain null if not set in an initializer—but remains a decent annotation for your system under test.

• @Spy, like @Mock, is designed to set up test doubles; you should use it when you have a collaborator that you want to stub or verify. Though there are cases where you could spy on your system under test, @Spy and @Mock are meant for dependencies, and not for the functionality you are testing.

Ideally, you should not have any class that fulfills both roles in the same test, or else you may find yourself writing a test that painstakingly tests behavior that you've stubbed rather than actual production behavior. In any case it will be more difficult to tell exactly what the test covers versus the behavior you've stubbed.

Of course, this may not apply if you're trying to use Mockito to test a single method in isolation, and you want to stub calls to one method while testing the other. This can be accomplished by creating a spy of your system-under-test and mocking some of its methods to avoid calling collaborators. However, this might also be an indication that your class is violating the Single Responsibility Principle, and that you should break down the class into multiple independent classes that work together. Then, in your test, you can allow instances to have exactly one role and never need both annotations at once.

An alternative to ArgumentMatcher is ArgumentCaptor.

Official example:

ArgumentCaptor<Person> argument = ArgumentCaptor.forClass(Person.class);
verify(mock).doSomething(argument.capture());
assertEquals("John", argument.getValue().getName());

A captor can also be defined using the @Captor annotation:

@Captor ArgumentCaptor<Person> captor;
//... MockitoAnnotations.initMocks(this);
@Test public void test() {
    //...
    verify(mock).doSomething(captor.capture());
    assertEquals("John", captor.getValue().getName());
}

org.mockito.runners.MockitoJUnitRunner is now indeed deprecated, you are supposed to use org.mockito.junit.MockitoJUnitRunner instead. As you can see only the package name has changed, the simple name of the class is still MockitoJUnitRunner.

Excerpt from the javadoc of org.mockito.runners.MockitoJUnitRunner:

Moved to MockitoJUnitRunner, this class will be removed with Mockito 3

I've had good success using Mockito.

When I tried learning about JMock and EasyMock, I found the learning curve to be a bit steep (though maybe that's just me).

I like Mockito because of its simple and clean syntax that I was able to grasp pretty quickly. The minimal syntax is designed to support the common cases very well, although the few times I needed to do something more complicated I found what I wanted was supported and easy to grasp.

Here's an (abridged) example from the Mockito homepage:

import static org.mockito.Mockito.*;

List mockedList = mock(List.class);
mockedList.clear();
verify(mockedList).clear();

It doesn't get much simpler than that.

The only major downside I can think of is that it won't mock static methods.

Mockito has an isNull matcher, where you can pass in the name of the class. So if you need to use it with other matchers, the correct thing to do is

verify(client).method(eq("String"),isNull(Class<?>.class));

This is now deprecated, see the answer below for the new method - https://stackoverflow.com/a/41250852/1348