Mocking Files in Java – Mock Contents – Mockito

You seem to be after contradictory goals. On the one hand, you’re trying to avoid writing data to disk, which isn’t a bad goal in tests. On the other, you’re trying to test your I/O-handling class, which means you’ll be working with system utilities that assume that your File will work with native calls. As such, here’s my guidance:

• Don’t try to mock a File. Just don’t. Too many native things depend on it.
• If you can, split your I/O-handling code into the half that opens a File and turns it into a Reader, and the half that parses HTML out of the Reader.
• At that point, you don’t need a mock at all–just construct a StringReader to simulate the data source.
• While that handles your unit tests pretty well, you may also want to write an integration test that uses a temporary file and ensure that it reads right. (Thanks Brice for adding that tip!)

Don’t be afraid to refactor your class to make testing easier, as here:

class YourClass {
  public int method(File file) {
    // do everything here, which is why it requires a mock
  }   
}   

class YourRefactoredClass {
  public int method(File file) {
    return methodForTest(file.getName(), file.isFile(),
        file.isAbsolute(), new FileReader(file));
  }   

  /** For testing only. */
  int methodForTest(
      String name, boolean isFile, boolean isAbsolute, Reader fileContents) {
    // actually do the calculation here
  }   
}   

class YourTest {
  @Test public int methodShouldParseBadHtml() {
    YourRefactoredClass yrc = new YourRefactoredClass();
    assertEquals(42, yrc.methodForTest(
        "bad.html", true, false, new StringReader(badHTMLText));
  }   
}   

At this point the logic in method is so straightforward it’s not worth testing,
and the logic in methodForTest is so easy to access that you can test it heavily.