annotation to make a private method public only for test classes [duplicate]

Answer 1

I am not aware of any such annotation, however the following may be of value: unit testing private methods
or the following: JMockit

Answer 2

I just put the test in the class itself by making it an inner class: http://www.ninthavenue.com.au/how-to-unit-test-private-methods

Answer 3

The common way is to make the private method protected or package-private and to put the unit test for this method in the same package as the class under test.

Guava has a @VisibleForTesting annotation, but it's only for documentation purposes.

Answer 4

An article on Testing Private Methods lays out some approaches to testing private code. using reflection puts extra burden on the programmer to remember if refactoring is done, the strings aren't automatically changed, but I think it's the cleanest approach.

Answer 5

As much as I know there is no annotation like this. The best way is to use reflection as some of the others suggested. Look at this post:
How do I test a class that has private methods, fields or inner classes?

You should only watch out on testing the exception outcome of the method. For example: if u expect an IllegalArgumentException, but instead you'll get "null" (Class:java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException).
A colegue of mine proposed using the powermock framework for these situations, but I haven't tested it yet, so no idea what exactly it can do. Although I have used the Mockito framework that it is based upon and thats a good framework too (but I think doesn't solve the private method exception issue).

It's a great idea though having the @PublicForTests annotation.

Cheers!

Answer 6

dp4j has what you need. Essentially all you have to do is add dp4j to your classpath and whenever a method annotated with @Test (JUnit's annotation) calls a method that's private it will work (dp4j will inject the required reflection at compile-time). You may also use dp4j's @TestPrivates annotation to be more explicit.

If you insist on also annotating your private methods you may use Google's @VisibleForTesting annotation.