Error When Stubbing Intent with Espresso

Question

I have two applications that interact with each other through intents. I would like to verify that let's say App A correctly calls the startActivity for App B without actually launching App B. I have tried various combinations of intending and Espresso still launches App B through the intent instead of just stubbing it out. This causes the remaining tests to fail as the UI is blocked by App B. Any ideas?

@RunWith( AndroidJUnit4.class )
@LargeTest
public class MyActivityUiIntentsTest
{

    @Rule
    public IntentsTestRule<MyActivity> activityRule =
            new IntentsTestRule<>( MyActivity.class, true, false );

    @Test
    public void shouldStartOtherActivityWhenButtonClicked ()
    {
        Intents.init();
        intending( toPackage( "my.package" ) )
            .respondWith( new ActivityResult( Activity.RESULT_OK, null ) );

        activityRule.launchActivity( new Intent() );

        onView( withId( R.id.viewId ) ).perform( click() );
        intended( hasComponent( hasShortClassName( "the.other.class.name" ) ) );

        Intents.release();
    }
}

UPDATED: Code for the onClick:

@OnClick( R.id.viewId )
public void startOtherActivity ()
{
   Intent intent = new Intent();
   intent.setClassName( "my.package", "the.other.class.name" );
   startActivity( intent );
   finish();
}

Answer 1

Move your intending... code below launchActivity and remove .init() because the IntentsTestRule will call init for you after the activity is launched

Answer 2

One of the possible solutions is to have indirection for intent dispatching.

For example we have IntentDispatcher which we replace with test implementation in functional ui tests via trick with custom instrumentation test runner.

Real implementation of IntentDispatcher just calls context.startActivity() while in tests we open special activity that displays all content of the Intent so we're able to verify that it was Intent that we wanted to process with Espresso matchers.

Also we wrote bunch of rules to handle things like opening camera app and mocking the result or just mocking regular startActivity() calls.