Mockito and Hamcrest: how to verify invocation of Collection argument?

I'm running into a generics problem with Mockito and Hamcrest.

Please assume the following interface:

public interface Service {
    void perform(Collection<String> elements);
}

And the following test snippet:

Service service = mock(Service.class);

// ... perform business logic

verify(service).perform(Matchers.argThat(contains("a", "b")));

So I want to verify that my business logic actually called the service with a collection that contains "a" and "b" in that order.

However, the return type of contains(...) is Matcher<Iterable<? extends E>>, so Matchers.argThat(...) returns Iterable<String> in my case, which naturally does not apply to the required Collection<String>.

I know that I could use an argument captor as proposed in https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17174192/hamcrest-hasitem-and-mockito-verify-inconsistency, but I would very much like not to.

Any suggestions! Thanks!

You can just write

verify(service).perform((Collection<String>) Matchers.argThat(contains("a", "b")));

From the compiler's point of view, this is casting an Iterable<String> to a Collection<String> which is fine, because the latter is a subtype of the former. At run time, argThat will return null, so that can be passed to perform without a ClassCastException. The important point about it is that the matcher gets onto Mockito's internal structure of arguments for verification, which is what argThat does.

As an alternative one could change the approach to ArgumentCaptor:

@SuppressWarnings("unchecked") // needed because of `List<String>.class` is not a thing
// suppression can be worked around by using @Captor on a field
ArgumentCaptor<List<String>> captor = ArgumentCaptor.forClass(List.class);

verify(service).perform(captor.capture());
assertThat(captor.getValue(), contains("a", "b"));

Notice, that as a side effect this decouples the verification from the Hamcrest library, and allows you to use any other library (e.g. Truth):

assertThat(captor.getValue()).containsExactly("a", "b");

If you get stuck in situations like these, remember that you can write a very small reusable adapter.

verify(service).perform(argThat(isACollectionThat(contains("foo", "bar"))));

private static <T> Matcher<Collection<T>> isACollectionThat(
    final Matcher<Iterable<? extends T>> matcher) {
  return new BaseMatcher<Collection<T>>() {
    @Override public boolean matches(Object item) {
      return matcher.matches(item);
    }

    @Override public void describeTo(Description description) {
      matcher.describeTo(description);
    }
  };
}

Note that David's solution above, with casting, is the shortest right answer.

You can put your own lambda as an ArgumentMatcher

when(myClass.myMethod(argThat(arg -> arg.containsAll(asList(1,2))))
    .thenReturn(...);

Why not just verify with the expected arguments, assuming the list only contains the two items, e.g.:

final List<String> expected = Lists.newArrayList("a", "b");
verify(service).perform(expected);

Whilst I agree with Eugen in principle, I think that relying on equals for String comparison is acceptable... besides, the contains matcher uses equals for comparison anyway.

You could have your own java.util.Collection implementation and override the equals method like below.

public interface Service {
    void perform(Collection<String> elements);
}

@Test
public void testName() throws Exception {
    Service service = mock(Service.class);
    service.perform(new HashSet<String>(Arrays.asList("a","b")));
    Mockito.verify(service).perform(Matchers.eq(new CollectionVerifier<String>(Arrays.asList("a","b"))));
}

public class CollectionVerifier<E> extends ArrayList<E> {

    public CollectionVerifier() {

    }

    public CollectionVerifier(final Collection<? extends E> c) {
        super(c);
    }

    @Override
    public boolean equals(final Object o) {
        if (o instanceof Collection<?>) {
            Collection<?> other = (Collection<?>) o;
                return this.size() == other.size() && this.containsAll(other);
        }
        return false;
    }

}