Showing (unexpected) exception messages in JUnit tests (Netbeans)

Question

When a JUnit test receives an unexpected RuntimeException, the NetBeans Test Results tab shows the name of the test that failed, followed by a stack trace.

Ex.

someFailedTest caused an ERROR: at (stack trace lines start here)

Not as helpful as it could be.

While the stack trace does let us track down where a problem occurred, it would be nice if NB also showed any message that accompanied the exception. (Ex. "x must be > 0 but was -2", or whatever.)

As far as I can tell it doesn't seem to be making the details available. Is there a way to show exception details that I'm missing?

I could use a try/catch or an error log, but is there a better way?

Here's an example of a (fake) "test" which shows a message clearly in Eclipse, but not in NB. Any insight welcome... yes I know this isn't an exception but it's the same type of problem.

    @Test
    public void testTest() {

        String file = "test";
        File f = new File("../" + file);
        if (!f.exists()) {
            Assert.fail("File was not found at " + file);
        }
    }

Edit... Yep, little bit confused now - I've seen it work correctly at least once or twice, but I'm unable to reproduce it now. I'll have to see if I can reproduce somewhere I can post screenshots from later...

Edit #2... Found some stranger behavior. If I do this (which is going to be my workaround for today), the test result list still looks the same, but I DO get a nice red and very helpful error message in the console:

String msg = "FXML file was not found at " + file;
System.err.print("test");
Assert.fail(msg);

But if I comment out the System.err line entirely, I get nothing in the console. Even more bizarre, if I put an empty string, I still get nothing in the console at all (Well, maybe print() is smart enough to ignore the empty string..):

String msg = "FXML file was not found at " + file;
System.err.print("");
Assert.fail(msg);

Answer 1

I know it's not what you want to hear, but I believe the standard way to do what you want is to use the try-catch like this:

try{
    ....
}catch(Throwable t){
    //Add some code to print the details of the Throwable here
    fail(t.getMessage());
}

I'm not aware of any settings that would allow you to tell Netbeans/JUnit to display the message of an uncaught exception/throwable.

Answer 2

My Netbeans shows the message. Here's an example:

Maybe Netbeans doesn't show the message under some circumstances. Maybe your top-level exception doesn't have a message associated with it. I'm using Netbeans 8.1, and I've made no relevant configuration changes.

Here's the example you posted. The message is also visible here.