Problems with mockito

[creativecreatorormaybenot]

Hi :)

As mocktail looks like a promising alternative to mockito that still provides a nice API, I was wondering how mocktail solves the problems that made mockito turn ugly :)

I checked the repo and could not find this documented anywhere. So essentially: how does mocktail solve the problems described at https://github.com/dart-lang/mockito/blob/9f107e6805f1778cc611f369a8b3338ebf120639/NULL_SAFETY_README.md#problems-with-typical-mocking-and-stubbing?

[felangel]

Hey @creativecreatorormaybenot 👋
Thanks for opening an issue!

Mocktail solves these issues by wrapping the stubs and verifications in a closure which allows the library to execute the stub/verification and handle the TypeError internally. Hope that helps! 👍

[creativecreatorormaybenot]

Thanks a lot for the response @felangel ❤️

Further questions: how does this compare to mockito? Are there drawbacks to the mocktail approach?

From your perspective: would you say this is a better approach or just different (emphasis on "your perspective" 🙃)?

[felangel]

No problem! The main drawback to this approach is that if you want to use an arg matcher (any, captureAny) for a custom type you need to register a fallback value

setUpAll(() {
  Mocktail.registerFallbackValue<MyType>(MyType());
});

when(() => foo.bar(any<MyType>()).thenReturn(...);

I personally think that this approach is still easier, more convenient, and closer to the previous mockito api than the latest mockito release. I’ve opened a proposal to merge mocktail into mockito which you can check out at dart-lang/mockito#347 🙂

[creativecreatorormaybenot]

I see, thanks a lot for that @felangel 🙏

My strawman take on this is that I agree with you 😜 Furthermore, I do not think that arg matchers are worth destroying the syntax anyway 😄 I have not yet experienced cases where I would need them in unit testing.

[creativecreatorormaybenot]

Do you want to leave this open as a reference for others @felangel?

Otherwise, I would be fine with closing this. Although an in-depth explanation going into the technical details would likely be helpful in general. I suppose one could also transform this into a documentation request :P

[felangel]

Do you want to leave this open as a reference for others @felangel?

Otherwise, I would be fine with closing this. Although an in-depth explanation going into the technical details would likely be helpful in general. I suppose one could also transform this into a documentation request :P

Yeah let’s keep it open until we document the approach better 👍

[kuhnroyal]

Thanks for sharing this information and your views! Maybe pin this issue :)