Unit Testing Basics

Litho provides testing helpers exposed through fluid AssertJ methods. They are available as:

ComponentAssert for assertions that are run against either Component builders or Components.
LithoViewAssert for assertions against mounted Components.

As a convenience, a LithoAssertions.assertThat method is provided that can be statically imported. It provides access to all matchers provided by ComponentAssert, LithoViewAssert as well as the regular core AssertJ matchers:

import static com.facebook.litho.testing.assertj.LithoAssertions.assertThat;

In order to use any of the testing capabilities, you need include the optional litho-testing package in your build. It is available as com.facebook.litho:litho-testing. To include it in your gradle build, add this line to your dependencies block:

testImplementation 'com.facebook.litho:litho-testing:0.36.0'

To demonstrate the usage of these classes, below is an example of a component that displays a like icon and a short description.

/**
 * Displays who liked the post.
 *
 * 1 - 3 likers => Comma separated names (e.g. Jane, Mike, Doug)
 * > 3 likers => Comma separated number denoting the like count
 */
@LayoutSpec
class LikersComponentSpec {

  @OnCreateLayout
  protected static Component onCreateLayout(
      ComponentContext c,
      @Prop List<User> likers) {

    return Row.create(c)
        .alignItems(FLEX_START)
        .child(
            Image.create(c)
                 .drawableRes(R.drawable.like))
        .child(
            Text.create(c)
                .text(formatLikers(likers))
                .textSizeSp(12)
                .ellipsize(TruncateAt.END))
        .build();
  }

  private static String formatLikers(List<User> likers) {
    ...
  }
}

For our test, we want to verify the rendering of the text and the icon.

Setup

The Litho testing framework provides a JUnit @Rule which sets up overrides for Styleables and allows easy access to a ComponentContext.

/**
 * Tests {@link LikersComponent}
 */
@RunWith(RobolectricTestRunner.class)
public class LikersComponentTest {
  @Rule
  public ComponentsRule mComponentsRule = new ComponentsRule();

Testing Component Rendering

The Litho framework includes a set of AssertJ-style helpers for verifying properties of your Components. Behind the scenes, this will mount the Component for you.

You can either assert on the pair of ComponentContext and Component or on the ComponentBuilder before it is consumed by build().

  @Test
  public void testTwoLikers() {
    ComponentContext c = mComponentsRule.getContext();
    ImmutableList<User> likers =
       ImmutableList.of(new User("Jane"), new User("Mike"));

    Component<LikersComponent> component =
       LikersComponent
           .create(c)
           .likers(likers)
           .build();

    assertThat(c, component).hasText("Jane, Mike");
  }

  @Test
  public void testLikeIcon() {
    ComponentContext c = mComponentsRule.getContext();
    Drawable likeIcon = c.getResources().getDrawable(R.drawable.like);

    ImmutableList<User> likers =
        ImmutableList.of(new User("Jane"), new User("Mike"));

    LikersComponent.Builder componentBuilder =
        LikersComponent
            .create(c)
            .likers(likers);

    assertThat(componentBuilder).hasDrawable(likeIcon);
  }

Additional Asserts

There are several more assertions available for Components and LithoViews. They all operate on the tree created by your mounted Component. So asserting the presence of a Drawable in your Component will traverse the view hierarchy from the provided starting point.

Caveats

When running Litho unit tests, be aware that the native library for Yoga must be loaded which can pose some challenges depending on your build system of choice. With Gradle and Robolectric, for instance, you may run into issues as Robolectric spins up new ClassLoaders for every test suite with a different configuration. The same goes for PowerMock, which prepares the ClassLoaders on a per-suite basis and leaves them in a non-reusable state.

The JVM has two important limitations that are relevant to this:

A shared library can only ever be loaded once per process.
ClassLoaders do not share information about the libraries loaded.

Because of that, using multiple ClassLoaders for test runs is highly problematic as every instance will attempt to load Yoga and every but the first will fail with a libyoga.so already loaded in another classloader exception.

The only way to avoid this is by either preventing the use of multiple ClassLoaders or forking the process whenever a new ClassLoader is necessary.

Gradle allows you to limit the number of test classes a process can execute before it is discarded. If you set the number to one, we avoid the ClassLoader reuse:

android {
    [...]

    testOptions {
        unitTests.all {
            forkEvery = 1
            maxParallelForks = Math.ceil(Runtime.runtime.availableProcessors() * 1.5)
        }
    }
}

With Buck, this behavior can be achieved by assigning test targets separate names as those will result in a parallel process being spun up. Alternatively, you can set the fork_mode to per_test as described here.

Ultimately, depending on your build system and the existing constraints of your project, you may need to adjust the way in which your test runner utilizes ClassLoaders. This is, however, not a problem unique to Litho but an unfortunate consequence of mixing native and Java code in Android projects.

Either head back to the testing overview or continue with the next section, Sub-Component Testing.

Setup#

Testing Component Rendering#

Additional Asserts#

Caveats#

Next#

Setup

Testing Component Rendering

Additional Asserts

Caveats

Next