BoundFields

Bound Fields (New in Guice 4.0)

Automatically bind field's values to their types.

Test code which uses Guice frequently follows the pattern whereby you create several fields in your test class and bind those fields to their types using a custom Module. BoundFieldModule can help simplify this pattern by automatically binding fields annotated with @Bind.

Binding Fields Manually

Frequently in order to test classes which are injected, you need to inject mocks or dummy values for the tested class's dependencies. In order to do this, a common pattern is the following:

public class TestFoo {
  private Bar barMock;

  // Foo depends on Bar.
  @Inject private Foo foo;

  @Before public void setUp() {
    barMock = ...;
    Guice.createInjector(getTestModule()).injectMembers(this);
  }

  private Module getTestModule() {
    return new AbstractModule() {
      @Provides
      Bar provideBar() {
        return barMock;
      }
    };
  }

  @Test public void testBehavior() {
    ...
  }
}

This class creates a field for the tested class's dependencies, places in that field a mock and binds the field into Guice with a custom Module.

Binding Fields Using BoundFieldModule

BoundFieldModule scans a given object for fields annotated with @Bind and binds those fields automatically. Using this, we can simplify our TestFoo class to:

public class TestFoo {
  // bind(Bar.class).toInstance(barMock);
  @Bind private Bar barMock;

  // Foo depends on Bar.
  @Inject private Foo foo;

  @Before public void setUp() {
    barMock = ...;
    Guice.createInjector(BoundFieldModule.of(this)).injectMembers(this);
  }

  @Test public void testBehavior() {
    ...
  }
}

This binding occurs under the following rules:

• For each @Bind annotated field of an object and its superclasses, this module will bind that field's type to that field's value at injector creation time. This includes both instance and static fields.
• If @Bind(to = ...) is specified, the field's value will be bound to the class specified by to instead of the field's actual type.
• If a BindingAnnotation or Qualifier is present on the field, that field will be bound using that annotation via annotatedWith. For example, bind(Bar.class).annotatedWith(BarAnnotation.class).toInstance(theValue). It is an error to supply more than one BindingAnnotation or Qualifier.
• If the field is of type Provider, the field's value will be bound as a provider using toProvider to the provider's parameterized type. For example, Provider<Integer> binds to Integer. Attempting to bind a non-parameterized Provider without a @Bind(to = ...) clause is an error.

See the javadocs for more information.