When testing an IntelliJ plugin, you'll likely reach for UI tests to verify that both the user interface as well as the code behind it functions correctly. In UI tests, your plugin runs in a real instance of IntelliJ that is similar to a production environment on a user's machine. That increases your end-to-end coverage but sometimes it's harder to verify success conditions for a test in that environment. So as a last resort, you might want to call into a service that's part of the plugin to verify some internal state directly.
For example, we found for our Symflower plugin, we needed this to check for progress indicators displayed by our plugin. We could not verify our plugin's progress indicators purely from the UI because they were too fast for the UI automation to pick them up. So we had to build a service into our plugin that, when run under test, keeps references to shown progress indicators to allow tests to verify them. But how would one go about doing that?
To find out, read the rest of this post on Symflower’s blog!
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