Correct way of using/testing event service in Eclipse E4 RCP
- by Thorsten Beck
Allow me to pose two coupled questions that might boil down to one about good application design ;-)
What is the best practice for using event based communication in an e4 RCP application?
How can I write simple unit tests (using JUnit) for classes that send/receive events using dependency injection and IEventBroker ?
Let’s be more concrete: say I am developing an Eclipse e4 RCP application consisting of several plugins that need to communicate. For communication I want to use the event service provided by org.eclipse.e4.core.services.events.IEventBroker so my plugins stay loosely coupled. I use dependency injection to inject the event broker to a class that dispatches events:
@Inject static IEventBroker broker;
private void sendEvent() {
broker.post(MyEventConstants.SOME_EVENT, payload)
}
On the receiver side, I have a method like:
@Inject
@Optional
private void receiveEvent(@UIEventTopic(MyEventConstants.SOME_EVENT) Object payload)
Now the questions:
In order for IEventBroker to be successfully injected, my class needs access to the current IEclipseContext. Most of my classes using the event service are not referenced by the e4 application model, so I have to manually inject the context on instantiation using e.g. ContextInjectionFactory.inject(myEventSendingObject, context);
This approach works but I find myself passing around a lot of context to wherever I use the event service. Is this really the correct approach to event based communication across an E4 application?
how can I easily write JUnit tests for a class that uses the event service (either as a sender or receiver)? Obviously, none of the above annotations work in isolation since there is no context available. I understand everyone’s convinced that dependency injection simplifies testability. But does this also apply to injecting services like the IEventBroker?
This article describes creation of your own IEclipseContext to include the process of DI in tests. Not sure if this could resolve my 2nd issue but I also hesitate running all my tests as JUnit Plug-in tests as it appears impractible to fire up the PDE for each unit test. Maybe I just misunderstand the approach.
This article speaks about “simply mocking IEventBroker”. Yes, that would be great! Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any information on how this can be achieved.
All this makes me wonder whether I am still on a "good path" or if this is already a case of bad design? And if so, how would you go about redesigning? Move all event related actions to dedicated event sender/receiver classes or a dedicated plugin?
