How to mock the Swing thread?

[Ahetuki Neti]

I want to mock the swing thread in my junit test so that I can easy unit tests for GUI. Could you please let me whether it is possible and how?

[Ilja Preuss]

I don't understand what you mean by "mock the Swing thread". Could you please elaborate? What kind of tests do you want to write?

[Ahetuki Neti]

In my GUI code, I have two types of threads functioning:
1. Java threads in the model fetching data from the server. These threads help in doing some background processing (lazy loading).
2. Swing threads (I dont have any control/reference to it) that function beyond my control in the events like "fireTableRowChanged.." etc.

The first type of threads can be easily controlled by me because I have references to them (I use a factory to generate them and I can easily mock them by mocking the factory). But the later ones are beyond my control and these are the ones which I need to control. I need to mock them so that all the threads in my junit tests become synchronous!

[Ilja Preuss]

I still wonder what kinds of tests you try to write. I've written a whole book chapter about writing unit tests for Swing components, and read a whole lot of other ones, and never came across the desire to synchronize some threads.

So could you please elaborate on why you think you need to?

[Ahetuki Neti]

Very simple! Instead of having different threads running parallely I want to force the usage of a single thread (mock) through all business classes.
Let me give an example:
In my unit test I create a row in an empty table -> event is fired -> Somehow the event handling (swing thread) is slower than the next step in my test case: Verifying a value in the created row -> I get ArrayOutOfBoundException because the row is not yet created!

[Ilja Preuss]

Can you post the code? I don't remember any such case in my practice and would like to try your code at home...