Mocking a service method within another service in Grails 2.3.4

I've been working with Grails recently. And one of the biggest wastes of time I deal with is Unit and Integration testing. Now, I'm not saying Tests are a waste of time: If you're creating useful and meaningful tests, then you're doing it right. If you're testing accessors and mutators... well, there's a special place in productivity hell that you belong.

One of the biggest things in Grails is that they support a lot of different ways to mock interactions wihin Unit tests. But sometimes, you want to test a service that relies on other services. If you're really trying to just test a single service and just need to ignore the wired-in auxillary services, ones first thought might be to use MockFor or MockDomain or any other mock.

For the love of God save yourself and don't do this

You'll find yourself dealing with a lot of useless and uninformative error messages if you do¹. And I really don't recommend trying to understand the long list of closures and other verbose messages that appear in the stack traces. (I myself was playing with metaClass as well and accidently broke the JVM running on my machine for a little while!)

So far, in my experience, the best way to mock out a couple simple functions within a test is to use a stub and to affect only the instance of the service you need to. It's simple, and it's a two parter like this:

@TestFor(SomeService)
public class SomeServiceTests{
    def someService
    @Before
    public void setup() throws Exception {
        def mock = [
        	someMethodInWiredService: {String anyparameters, Object youmighthave -> return "mock!" }
        ] as WiredService
        someService.wiredService = mock
        //... continue on happily
    }
    ...

And that's it. No strange MockFor(ClassName) or wondering whether or not you've restored a services metaClass to it's original state or anything of that nature. To me, this is the way that makes sense to mock during an integration test. This might not fit into your scenario, as really the reason why I'm doing this is because I need to essentially ignore another service. Why? I need to run this test in the integration environment, but since this other services calls performs a lot of other things (like sending emails for example), and I don't really want to verify or wait for those processes to complete², I just stub it out.

^{1 Ok maybe you can use it sometimes usefully, but you shouldn't be using Mocks in integration tests most of the time. The use case here is that you need to just stub out a service call during a test. 2 And the other service has it's own test that handles all of it's testing}