How to assert that a certain exception is thrown in jUnit4.5 tests

Question

How can use jUnit4.5 idiomatically to test that come code throws an exception?

While I can certainly do something like this:

@Test
public void testFooThrowsIndexOutOfBoundsException() {
  boolean thrown = false;

  try {
    foo.doStuff();
  } catch (IndexOutOfBoundsException e) {
    thrown = true;
  }

  assertTrue(thrown);
}

I recall that there is an annotation or an Assert.xyz or something that is far less cludgy and far more in-the-spirit of jUnit for these sorts of situations.

Answer 1

How about this: Catch a very general exception, make sure it makes it out of the catch block, then assert that the class of the exception is what you expect it to be. This assert will fail if a) the exception is of the wrong type (eg. if you got a Null Pointer instead) and b) the exception wasn't ever thrown.

public void testFooThrowsIndexOutOfBoundsException() {
  Throwable e = null;

  try {
    foo.doStuff();
  } catch (Throwable ex) {
    e = ex;
  }

  assertTrue(ex instanceof IndexOutOfBoundsException);
}

Answer 2

JUnit has built-in support for this, with an "expected" attribute

Answer 3

JUnit 4 has support for this:

@Test(expected=IndexOutOfBoundsException.class)
public void testIndexOutOfBoundsException() {
    ArrayList emptyList = new ArrayList();
    Object o = emptyList.get(0);
}

Answer 4

Be careful using expected exception, because it only asserts that the method threw that exception, not a particular line of code in the test.

I tend to use this for testing parameter validation, because such methods are usually very simple, but more complex tests might better be served with:

try {
    methodThatShouldThrow();
    fail( "My method didn't throw when I expected it to" );
} catch (MyException expectedException) {
}

Apply judgement.

Answer 5

If you can use JUnit 4.7, you can use the ExpectedException Rule

@RunWith(JUnit4.class)
public class FooTest {
  @Rule
  public ExpectedException exception = ExpectedException.none();

  @Test
  public void doStuffThrowsIndexOutOfBoundsException() {
    Foo foo = new Foo();

    exception.expect(IndexOutOfBoundsException.class);
    foo.doStuff();
  }
}

This is much better than @Test(expected=IndexOutOfBoundsException.class) because the test will fail if IndexOutOfBoundsException is thrown before foo.doStuff()

See this article for details