[jdt-apt-dev] unit test for annotation processors?

[James Kingdon <jkingdon@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

Does anyone have any suggestions for
unit testing annotation processors? At a high level, an ideal situation
would be if there was a factory method for AnnotationProcessorEnvironment
objects which took a Java source file as input (perhaps as a String containing
source code, or more conveniently a reference to a file). The APE instance
could then be passed into the constructor of the annotation processor and
the process method called. The behaviour could then be measured by obtaining
the Messager instance from the APE and interrogating it for the expected
set of errors.

I couldn't see an obvious factory method
of that sort, so I tried a few ideas using Proxies, reflection, subclasses
etc. Unfortunately, the design of BaseProcessorEnv seems to make this quite
difficult. The constructor calls AptPlugin.getAptProject(javaProj);
which makes it difficult to create an instance to delegate calls to without
having a valid IJavaProject.

Anybody been down this road already
and have some pointers?

Thanks,

James Kingdon