Retrofit 2 mock best practice

Question

I am very new to testing and TDD and I decided to use use Retrofit2-Mock for my api mocking needs. The documentation on Mock Retrofit2 is virtually non existent and the only how-to resources that I found is this article from 2015 and this answer from 2016.

In these a BehaviorDelegate class is used which does not implement the mocked api Interface and needs to be wrapped.

Is there a more elegant way to obtain the mock api service?

Or am I missing the whole point and the Retrofit2-Mock tool is not considered to be in the "best practice stack"? Specially since there are so few articles about it

Answer 1

This issue on Retrofit's Github repo is asking about the non-existent documentation you were asking about (it is still open while writing this answer).

Well, you have 2 options (both are in the article you already mentioned), and it depends on how you want to define your Givens/Inputs:

Option 1: (Okhttp's MockWebServer)

If you usually start your TDD by dealing with your backend's json response (using something like Postman), & you would feel more confident if you used that returned json directly as the input for your tests, then use MockWebServer, where you would copy/paste the json you already have & start developing your tests from there.

Option 2: (Retrofit's own Mock Web Server)

If you prefer defining your givens/inputs using objects for the models you already use in your code, which would make your tests more readable & controllable, then use Retrofit's mock web server just like how it is used in this official sample mentioned by @JakeWharton

---

Both options are developed/maintained by the same awesome people of Square, so it is really about how you want to define your givens/inputs.

Answer 2

I usually use Mockito like this

1. Import Retrofit Mock

   <dependency>
       <groupId>com.squareup.retrofit2</groupId>
       <artifactId>retrofit-mock</artifactId>
       <version>${version.retrofit}</version>
       <scope>test</scope>
   </dependency>
   

2. Create and use the mock

   import retrofit2.mock.Calls;
   import static org.mockito.Mockito.when;
   import static org.mockito.Mockito.mock;
   
   ...
   
   Api api = mock(Api.class); // Mockito mock
   
   ...
   
   when(api.doSomething(param)).thenReturn(Calls.response(response));
   

Retrofit Mock is used only to generate the response.