PowerMockito mock single static method and return object

Question

What you want to do is a combination of part of 1 and all of 2.

You need to use the PowerMockito.mockStatic to enable static mocking for all static methods of a class. This means make it possible to stub them using the when-thenReturn syntax.

But the 2-argument overload of mockStatic you are using supplies a default strategy for what Mockito/PowerMock should do when you call a method you haven't explicitly stubbed on the mock instance.

From the javadoc:

Creates class mock with a specified strategy for its answers to interactions. It's quite advanced feature and typically you don't need it to write decent tests. However it can be helpful when working with legacy systems. It is the default answer so it will be used only when you don't stub the method call.

The default default stubbing strategy is to just return null, 0 or false for object, number and boolean valued methods. By using the 2-arg overload, you're saying "No, no, no, by default use this Answer subclass' answer method to get a default value. It returns a Long, so if you have static methods which return something incompatible with Long, there is a problem.

Instead, use the 1-arg version of mockStatic to enable stubbing of static methods, then use when-thenReturn to specify what to do for a particular method. For example:

import static org.mockito.Mockito.*;

import org.junit.Test;
import org.junit.runner.RunWith;
import org.mockito.invocation.InvocationOnMock;
import org.mockito.stubbing.Answer;
import org.powermock.api.mockito.PowerMockito;
import org.powermock.core.classloader.annotations.PrepareForTest;
import org.powermock.modules.junit4.PowerMockRunner;

class ClassWithStatics {
  public static String getString() {
    return "String";
  }

  public static int getInt() {
    return 1;
  }
}

@RunWith(PowerMockRunner.class)
@PrepareForTest(ClassWithStatics.class)
public class StubJustOneStatic {
  @Test
  public void test() {
    PowerMockito.mockStatic(ClassWithStatics.class);

    when(ClassWithStatics.getString()).thenReturn("Hello!");

    System.out.println("String: " + ClassWithStatics.getString());
    System.out.println("Int: " + ClassWithStatics.getInt());
  }
}

The String-valued static method is stubbed to return "Hello!", while the int-valued static method uses the default stubbing, returning 0.