Mocking Static Blocks in Java

My motto for Java is "just because Java has static blocks, it doesn't mean that you should be using them." Jokes aside, there are a lot of tricks in Java that make testing a nightmare. Two of the most I hate are Anonymous Classes and Static Blocks. We have a lot of legacy code that make use of Static Blocks and these are one of the annoying points in our push in writing unit tests. Our goal is to be able to write unit tests for classes that depend on this static initialization with minimal code changes.

So far my suggestion to my colleagues is to move the body of the static block into a private static method and call it staticInit. This method can then be called from within the static block. For unit testing another class that depends on this class could easily mock staticInit with JMockit to not do anything. Let's see this in example.

public class ClassWithStaticInit {
  static {
    System.out.println("static initializer.");
  }
}

Will be changed to

public class ClassWithStaticInit {
  static {
    staticInit();
  }

  private static void staticInit() {
    System.out.println("static initialized.");
  }
}

So that we can do the following in a JUnit.

public class DependentClassTest {
  public static class MockClassWithStaticInit {
    public static void staticInit() {
    }
  }

  @BeforeClass
  public static void setUpBeforeClass() {
    Mockit.redefineMethods(ClassWithStaticInit.class, MockClassWithStaticInit.class);
  }
}

However this solution also comes with its own problems. You can't run DependentClassTest and ClassWithStaticInitTest on the same JVM since you actually want the static block to run for ClassWithStaticInitTest.

What would be your way of accomplishing this task? Or any better, non-JMockit based solutions that you think would work cleaner?

When I run into this problem, I usually do the same thing you describe, except I make the static method protected so I can invoke it manually. On top of this, I make sure that the method can be invoked multiple times without problems (otherwise it is no better than the static initializer as far as the tests go).

This works reasonably well, and I can actually test that the static initializer method does what I expect/want it to do. Sometimes it is just easiest to have some static initialization code, and it just isn't worth it to build an overly complex system to replace it.

When I use this mechanism, I make sure to document that the protected method is only exposed for testing purposes, with the hopes that it won't be used by other developers. This of course may not be a viable solution, for example if the class' interface is externally visible (either as a sub-component of some kind for other teams, or as a public framework). It is a simple solution to the problem though, and doesn't require a third party library to set up (which I like).