Description
I'd like to propose a change that I think would make the assertEquals methods easier to work with - apologies if I've missed something.
When a test fails in Eclipse with assertEquals() and the parameters are not strings, an AssertionError is thrown. This gives a backtrace, but to see what was not equal, I have to copy and paste out the error into another editor to read the top line. Here's a screen shot:
It would be great if could throw a ComparisonFailure. I'd still see pretty much the same failure trace:
but I'd be about to double click it/click the "Compare with Expected Results" button and get this:
which would be a tremendous help to my work flow.
When looking into this I did think surely Eclipse could do something better, but I don't think it can. An AssertionError doesn't have the expected and actual results. They are thrown away by the call to failNotEquals which calls 'format' that then concatenates a single string to pass to AssertionError
So looking at assertEquals for Object's could we just do away with the instanceof checks?
public static void assertEquals(String message, Object expected,
Object actual) {
if (equalsRegardingNull(expected, actual)) {
return;
}
if (expected instanceof String && actual instanceof String) {
String cleanMessage = message == null ? "" : message;
throw new ComparisonFailure(cleanMessage, (String) expected,
(String) actual);
} else {
failNotEquals(message, expected, actual);
}
}