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In JUnit with Mockito, how can I wait for an asynchronous method to complete?

I am writing an integration test against some code that asynchronously creates a record when a different value is updated in the database. I would like to check the state of the system after the record is created, verifying that it was created as expected. The test therefore needs to wait until the record is created.
I can use Mockito to create a spy for the function that creates the record. Mockito even has the option to wait for the method to be called via Mockito.timeout, giving up if a certain amount of time has elapsed without the method being called:
// Use or create/wire in spy. In my case, this is set up with #SpyBean from spring-boot-test.
RecordCreationService recordCreationServiceSpy = ...;
testClass.update(someValue);
Mockito.verify(recordCreationServiceSpy, Mockito.timeout(10_000)).createRecord(ArgumentMatchers.any());
However, this merely waits for the call to have started, not for it to have been completed. Thus, this enters a race condition where the verification can finish before the desired call completes.
How can I cleanly and simply wait for the completion of a process before verifying in JUnit with Mockito?

This functionality doesn't directly exist in Mockito, as there is currently an open issue to add this functionality to Mockito (Mockito issue #1089).
The solution I am currently using is to write a custom answer for the spied method that waits for the call to be completed before returning. I then verify the result normally afterward.
#SpyBean
private RecordCreationService recordCreationServiceSpy;
#Test(timeout = 10_000)
public void recordShouldBeCreatedWhenDataIsUpdated() {
// Set up test here
updateValueAndWait(value);
assertEquals(1, recordRepository.findAll().size());
// Perform any additional verifications
}
private void updateValueAndWait(String value) {
CountDownLatch latch = new CountDownLatch(1);
Mockito.doAnswer(invocation -> {
Object result = invocation.callRealMethod();
latch.countDown();
return result;
}).when(recordCreationServiceSpy).insertRecord(any());
testClass.update(value);
try {
latch.await();
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
throw new RuntimeException(e);
}
}

How to run two asynchronus task synchronously

I am new to multithreading concept in java(springboot) and have a scenario to solve.There is a function in which 2 asynchronus functions are called.I want to make their execution happen synchronously.eg:
public void func(){
call1();
call2();
}
#Async
public void call1(){}
#Async
public void call2(){}
Can anyone please suggest a method to achieve this functionality.
Thanks

Not exactly sure whats the motivation over here, but from what I could understand from the question, the objective seems like that you dont want to block the main thread (thread executing func()), and at the same time achieve serial execution of call1() and call2(). If thats what you want, you could perhaps make call1() and call2() synchronous (i.e. remove the #Async annotation), and add a third asynchronous method (callWrapper() perhaps), and invoke call1() and call2() serially in that method.

You can wait on #Async methods if you change them to return a Future. For example like this:
#Component
class AsyncStuff {
#Async
public ListenableFuture<?> call1() {
/** do things */
return AsyncResult.forValue(null);
}
#Async
public ListenableFuture<?> call2() {
/** do other things */
return AsyncResult.forValue(null);
}
}
#Component
class User {
#Autowired
AsyncStuff asyncStuff; // #Async methods work only when they are in a different class
public void use() throws InterruptedException, ExecutionException {
asyncStuff
.call1() // starts this execution in another thread
.get(); // lets this thread wait for the other thread
asyncStuff
.call2() // now start the seconds thing
.get(); // and wait again
}
}
But it's guaranteed to be slower than simply doing all this without async because all this adds is overhead to move execution between threads. The calling thread could instead of waiting for other threads to do things simply execute the code itself in that time.

JUnit test of a java asyncron method

Today I had to write a method which get a String as a parameter, make a new thread and write it out to the consol after 5 seconds waiting, so something like this:
public void exampleMethod(final String str){
Runnable myRunnable = new Runnable(){
public void run(){
try {
Thread.sleep(5000);
System.out.println(str);
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
//handling of the exception
}
}
};
Thread thread = new Thread(myRunnable);
thread.start();
//some other things to do
}
My question is: How can I test and what should I test in here with JUnit?
Thank you!

There is nothing complex in this method. You are only using standard API-methods: Thread.sleep, System.out.println, ...
The parameter is just printed, you don't modify it nor use it for a calculation or another method.
There are no side-effects to your own written code, just to the STL.
And there is no result of the method, which you could test.
In my opinion it is not necessary and not simply possible to test it.
The only thing you could test (and even that wouldn't be trivial), is, if after an amount of time the String is printed.

[...] JUnit finishes execution while the thread is still alive. There could have been problems down the line, toward the end of that thread's execution, but your test would never reflect it.
The problem lies in JUnit's TestRunner. It isn't designed to look for Runnable instances and wait around to report on their activities. It fires them off and forgets about them. For this reason, multithreaded unit tests in JUnit have been nearly impossible to write and maintain.
Well, the source - this article - is from 2003 and there's no guarantee that this hasn't been fixed yet, but you may try it out yourself.
My suggestion would be:
Run your code and measure the time it takes. Then add some 1000 milliseconds and but a Thread.sleep(executionTime+1000); after you started you asynchronous task. Not that elegant, but should work in practice. If you want more elegance here (and waste less time), you may want to look for framework that provide a solution.
...Or if you start your Thread directly in the test, you may also use Thread.join to wait, but you will have cases, where you aren't able to do that.
EDIT:
Also check this article, which could provide a solution to pipe those errors to the main thread:
public class AsynchTester{
private Thread thread;
private volatile Error error;
private volatile RuntimeException runtimeExc;
public AsynchTester(final Runnable runnable) {
thread = new Thread(new Runnable() {
#Override
public void run() {
try {
runnable.run();
} catch (Error e) {
error = e;
} catch (RuntimeException e) {
runtimeExc = e;
}
}
});
}
public void start() {
thread.start();
}
public void test() throws InterruptedException {
thread.join();
if (error != null)
throw error;
if (runtimeExc != null)
throw runtimeExc;
}
}
Use it like that:
#Test
public void test() throws InterruptedException {
AsynchTester tester = new AsynchTester(new Runnable() {
#Override
public void run() {
//async code
}
});
tester.start();
tester.test();
}

The issue here is that you are trying to test an interaction instead of a simple returned result or a state change. However, that does not mean it can't be done.
The standard out PrintStream can be replaced with System.setOut(). You can inject your own mock implementation that would allow you verify that the String was written to the stream. You just have to be careful, since this changes the global state, it might effect other code or tests that rely on standard output. At a minimum, you will have to put back the original stream. But things might get more complicated if tests are running in parallel.
This takes us to the next issue, the sleep. There isn't a strong guarantee to how long a sleep will block. This means your test would have to provide some buffer to ensure that the thread had time to write the String before checking the state of the mock stream. You don't want your test to be flaky because of some execution timing jitter. So you would have to decide what buffer you would consider acceptable.
An alternative approach would be to change the implementation of the code so that it is easier to test.
The simplest way to do this is to remove all the static dependencies. Instead of explicitly referencing System.out, the class could be initialized with with an PrintStream to write to. Additionally, you could define an interface that would wrap Thread.sleep(). For testing purposes, you can initialize the class with the mock stream and no-op implementation of the sleep interface. However, you may still have some timing issues as you need the newly created thread to execute before continuing the test.
The other thing you can do is take a step back and decide how much you care about this code being tested. There are only 4 interesting lines of code in this sample and none of them are complicated. Having a code review could be sufficient to ensure there are no bugs.
However, if the business logic is more complicate than writing to standard out, you might decided that testing that is important. The good news is that scheduling a task in an executor is straight forward and that is the part that is making the testing hard. You could make an abstraction that encompasses the scheduling of the task in a background thread. Then provide yourself with more direct access to the business logic in order to test that.

I have often solved that, by providing a ResultTarget which implements an interface IResultTarget to the thread,
In productive code the result will be a list that contains the calculation result. (or null)
In your unit test the ResultTarget is the unit test class itself, which then easily can check the received result.
public Interface IResultTarget {
List getResult();
}
public void ThreadTest extends TestCase implements IResultTarget {
List result;
public List getResult(
return this.result;
}
public void testThread() {
MyRunnable myRunnable= new MyRunnable ();
myRunnable.setResultTarget(this);
Thread thread = new Thread(myRunnable);
thread .start();
Thread.sleep(5 * 1000);
// expecting one element as result of the work of myRunnable.
assertEquals(1, result.size());
}
}

Mockito: wait for an invocation that matches arguments

I'm writing a selenium test and verifying the server behavior with mockito. Specifically, when a button is clicked, I want to make sure the page controller calls a particular method on a dependency which I've mocked.
Because it is a selenium test, I need to wait for the mock to be invoked in another thread, so I'm using mockito timeout.
verify(myMock, timeout(5000).times(1)).myMethod("expectedArg");
The trouble that I'm having is that myMethod is called many times... rather than waiting for an invocation that matches the expected arguments, timeout only waits for the first invocation.
If I use Thread.sleep(50000) rather than timeout(50000), it works as expected... but that's dirty so I'm hoping to avoid it.
How do I wait for myMethod to be invoked with the expected input?

If you are able to set a fixed number of calls to expect, it can be done with an ArgumentCaptor:
import static org.hamcrest.CoreMatchers.hasItem;
#Captor ArgumentCaptor<String> arg;
#Before
public void setUp() throws Exception {
// init the #Captor
initMocks(this);
}
#Test
public void testWithTimeoutCallOrderDoesntMatter() throws Exception {
// there must be exactly 99 calls
verify(myMock, timeout(5000).times(99)).myMethod(arg.capture());
assertThat(arg.getAllValues(), hasItem("expectedArg"));
}
Another way is to specify all the expected values to verify, but those need to be provided in the exact order that they are invoked. The difference to the above solution is that this doesn't fail even if the mock is additionally called with some non-verified arguments. In other words, no need to know the number of total invocations. Code example:
#Test
public void testWithTimeoutFollowingCallsDoNotMatter() throws Exception {
// the order until expected arg is specific
verify(callback, timeout(5000)).call("firstExpectedArg");
verify(callback, timeout(5000)).call("expectedArg");
// no need to tell more, if additional calls come after the expected arg
// verify(callback, timeout(5000)).call("randomArg");
}

This is not a super clean solution but you can do this (XX is the supposed return type here):
final CountDownLatch latch = new CountDownLatch(1);
doReturn(new Answer<XX>()
{
#Override
public XX answer(InvocationOnMock invocation)
{
latch.countDown();
return someInstanceOfXX;
}
}
).when(myMock).myMethod("expectedArg");
Then, to test if the method is called, do:
try {
assertTrue(latch.await(5L, TimeUnit.SECONDS));
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
// Urgh... Failed. Deal with it and:
Thread.currentThread().interrupt();
}

Dealing with System.exit(0) in JUnit tests

I am implementing some tests for an existing Java Swing application, so that I can safely refactor and extend the code without breaking anything. I started with some unit tests in JUnit, since that seems the simplest way to get started, but now my priority is to create some end-to-end tests to exercise the application as a whole.
I am starting the application afresh in each test by putting each test method in a separate test case, and using the fork="yes" option in Ant's junit task. However, some of the use cases I would like to implement as tests involve the user exiting the application, which results in one of the methods calling System.exit(0). This is regarded by JUnit as an error: junit.framework.AssertionFailedError: Forked Java VM exited abnormally.
Is there a way to tell JUnit that exiting with a return code of zero is actually OK?

The library System Rules has a JUnit rule called ExpectedSystemExit. With this rule you are able to test code, that calls System.exit(...):
public class MyTest {
#Rule
public final ExpectedSystemExit exit = ExpectedSystemExit.none();
#Test
public void systemExitWithArbitraryStatusCode() {
exit.expectSystemExit();
/* the code under test, which calls System.exit(...)
* with an arbitrary status
*/
}
#Test
public void systemExitWithSelectedStatusCode0() {
exit.expectSystemExitWithStatus(0);
//the code under test, which calls System.exit(0)
}
}
System Rules needs at least JUnit 4.9.
Full disclosure: I'm the author of System Rules.

How I deal with that is to install a security manager that throws an exception when System.exit is called. Then there is code that catches the exception and doesn't fail the test.
public class NoExitSecurityManager
extends java.rmi.RMISecurityManager
{
private final SecurityManager parent;
public NoExitSecurityManager(final SecurityManager manager)
{
parent = manager;
}
public void checkExit(int status)
{
throw new AttemptToExitException(status);
}
public void checkPermission(Permission perm)
{
}
}
And then in the code, something like:
catch(final Throwable ex)
{
final Throwable cause;
if(ex.getCause() == null)
{
cause = ex;
}
else
{
cause = ex.getCause();
}
if(cause instanceof AttemptToExitException)
{
status = ((AttemptToExitException)cause).getStatus();
}
else
{
throw cause;
}
}
assertEquals("System.exit must be called with the value of " + expectedStatus, expectedStatus, status);

Could you abstract out the "system exiting" into a new dependency, so that in your tests you could just have a fake which records the fact that exit has been called (and the value), but use an implementation which calls System.exit in the real application?

If anybody needs this functionality for JUnit 5, I've written an extension to do this. This is a simple annotation you can use to tell your test case to expect and exit status code or a specific exit status code.
For example, any exit code will do:
public class MyTestCases {
#Test
#ExpectSystemExit
public void thatSystemExitIsCalled() {
System.exit(1);
}
}
If we want to look for a specific code:
public class MyTestCases {
#Test
#ExpectSystemExitWithStatus(1)
public void thatSystemExitIsCalled() {
System.exit(1);
}
}