How to go about mocking a class with final methods?

Question

Say I have class A with

class A {
  final String foo() {
    // .. computing result, contacting database, whatever ..
    return "some computed value";
  }
  // ... and a bazillion other methods, some of them final.
}

Now I have class B with

class B {
  String methodIWantToTest(A a) {
      String output = a.foo();
      // ... whatever this method does, e.g.:
      output += "_suffix";
      return output;
  }
}

How would I go about unit testing this method? The reason foo() is final is because we don't want our classes which extend A to change its functionality. But at the same time to truly unit test the method, I don't want it to reach out and run the actual A.foo() method.

Is there a way to, say, remove the final keyword and add an annotation along the lines of @finalUnlessTest? What would you recommend? Refactoring A to an interface would be very, very difficult, seeing as how it's one of our central classes and is unfortunately pretty extremely coupled.

Edit #1 Sorry, forgot to mention, we're talking Java. We are not using a mocking framework as of yet.

Answer OK, so: wow. JMockit is just incredible and is in my eyes the killer app for testing legacy code. Unbelievably useful especially in my case. Thanks so much! You basically would do something like the following for my psuedo-example:

class AMock {
   final String foo() {
     return "myTestValue";
   }
}
class Test extends TestCase {
   A mockedA;
   B b;
   protected void setUp() {
      Mockit.redefineMethods( A.class, AMock.class );  // this "pipes" all mocked methods from A to AMock
      mockedA = new A();    // NOT new AMock()!!!
      b = new B();
   }
   public void testB() {
      assertEquals("myTestValue",mockedA.foo());
      assertEquals("myTestValue_suffix",b.methodIWantToTest(mockedA));
   }
}

Is this frickin' cool or what?

Answer 1

You can try the JMockit mocking library.