Android UI Test: Mocking the ViewModel with or without Dagger? Part 2

In the first part of this post, I explored the approach of setting up a UI test with a mock ViewModel without using Dagger 2 for dependency injection. I used the GithubBrowserSample app from the Architecture Components sample code to demonstrate disabling Dagger for UI testing, even though the app itself uses Dagger.

Now, using Dagger

There are various ways of using Dagger to provide fake or mock version of dependencies for testing. Generally they involve writing test versions of the component and module classes.

Then when the Espresso test is run, somehow the Dagger object graph that is built (incorporating the mock dependencies provided by the test module) is used instead of the one used just for the app. Some of the ways to do this includes:

• Include a hook into the application class to replace the Dagger components with the test versions.

http://blog.sqisland.com/2015/04/dagger-2-espresso-2-mockito.html

• Once again create a test version of the application class in the androidTest directory. Here the test application would be a subclass of the app application class where the code to build the Dagger graph is overriden with the test version.

http://blog.sqisland.com/2015/12/mock-application-in-espresso.html

Of course, this would mean writing a custom test runner to use instead of AndroidJUnitRunner in the gradle build file.

• If you are using the AndroidInjector from the Dagger Android library, then in the test application class you can override the activityInjector() method to return your own AndroidInjector instead of the DispatchingAndroidInjector from the app.

public class YourApp extends Application implements hasActivityInjector {

  @Inject
  DispatchingAndroidInjector<Activity> dispatchingAndroidInjector;
  .
  .
  .
  @Override
  public DispatchingAndroidInjector<Activity> activityInjector() {
    return dispatchingAndroidInjector;
  }
}

// The test app in the androidTest directory
public class TestApp extends YourApp {

  @Override
  public AndroidInjector<Activity> activityInjector() {
    return new AndroidInjector<Activity>() {
      @Override
      public void inject(Activity instance) {
        // inject the fake / mock dependencies into the activity
        // e.g.
        .
        .
        .
        ((YourActivity)instance).viewModelFactory = ...
      }
    };
  }
}

Other options I came across in my research include:

• There is the DaggerMock library that uses a JUnit Rule to override Dagger objects. This is a nice idea, but currently DaggerMock only has limited support for Dagger Android. In particular it does not handle abstract modules and methods which some of the Dagger Android annotations depend on.
• Include a hook in the activity to set dependencies.

https://blog.stylingandroid.com/architecture-components-summary/

Disadvantages, again

As I mentioned in the previous post, any of these approaches that uses a custom test application class for instrumentation testing would apply the same Dagger object graph to all the tests. This is not suitable for my situation where I only want to mock the ViewModel for the UI tests, but use the real one for other tests.

Other ways require making code changes to the app just to accommodate testing. This is a bit of a hack and not good design.

One Possible Solution

The solution I decided to use was based on this gist. The test module was used to create a AndroidInjector that would inject a custom ViewModel factory into the test activity. In turn the custom ViewModel factory would provide the mock ViewModel.

.
.
return new AndroidInjector<MyActivity>() {
  @Override
  public void inject(MyActivity instance) {
    // create the viewmodel mocks
    MyViewModel viewModel = Mockito.mock(MyViewModel.class);

    // create the livedata used to return results
    MutableLiveData<Data> returnedData = new MutableLiveData<>();
    when(viewModel.getData()).thenReturn(returnedData);

    // set test data
    Data expectedData = ...
    returnedData.setValue(expectedData);

    // set the custom viewmodel factory that just returns the mocks
    instance.viewModelFactory = ViewModelUtil.createFor(viewModel);
  }
};

This approach did have the downside of requiring a lot of boilerplate code. But it also allowed me to only mock the ViewModel for the UI tests, without affecting the other tests.

Disclaimer

Please note that the opinions expressed in this post are not meant to apply to all instrumentation testing with Dagger.

They are only for the specific use case of trying to mock the ViewModel for my UI tests, while not affecting other instrumentation tests.