Skip to main content

Pointless boolean expression inspection (aka GroovyPointlessBoolean) in Spock tests broken in IntelliJ IDEA

When writing a data driven table test in Spock where my result is a simple boolean true or false, I discovered that IntelliJ IDEA runs an inspection and decides that the code can be simplified by simply removing the result value.  This means it wants to take a result data table that looks like this:

where: 
checkpoint   || result 
"2018-10-22" || false 

And make it look like this:

where: 
checkpoint   || result 
"2018-10-22" || 

After allowing this inspection to make a change,  the test will no longer run.  IntelliJ offers the option to ignore this inspection at the method or class level with an annotation:

@SuppressWarnings("GroovyPointlessBoolean")

Unfortunately, this solution also causes the code to not compile.

The only solution seems to be to either ignore the warning and let the little yellow box remain yellow or to disable this inspection entirely within IntelliJ IDEA.  I chose the latter, and disabled it only within Groovy.  I really like code inspections, and I hate losing this static analysis, but sometimes there are just certain checks that get a bit confused.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Spring Security - Authority vs Role

I have spent a lot of time recently trying to understand the difference between Authority and Role in Spring Security.  This is a brief review of what I found. When creating a UserDetailsService or overriding configure(AuthenticationManagerBuilder auth) in the security config class that extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter, I basically get complete control over what I populate inside of the UserDetails that is used/returned.  This is important because the UserDetails interface really only cares about how to return one thing: Collection<? extends GrantedAuthority> getAuthorities(); A GrantedAuthority just seems like a glorified String wrapper that names some thing.  The question is... what is that thing? This is where the subtle difference between Authority and Role comes into play. I think that Role is an older thought/construct that automatically gets plugged into Authority if we just create a user with a Role.  But completely forget about the code a...

JHipster, Liquibase, MySQL, and initializing data, including booleans!

When generating a data model from JHipster JDL, we will often declare entities with Boolean fields.  I have so far abandoned H2 as a database because of liquibase issues, and both my dev and production databases will be MySQL.  This is relevant to the Boolean field desire there is a long history in software development of how to store Boolean data types in a SQL database whose standards classically do not support Boolean. In the current JHipster/Liquibase incarnation, tables in MySQL are generated for us, which is really nice.  The Boolean data types are stored as BIT  (1).  This is not a problem so far -- most developers seem to agree now that as a best practice, we should store values in databases as false = 0 and true = 1, and a BIT(1) is a great, simple way to do that. An issue arises when we try to use liquibase to set/update our database to the desired starting state.  For my project, I've chosen gradle instead of maven as a build tool, and gradle...

SQL, Booleans, JPA, and Hibernate

For a long time, SQL and Booleans have not gotten along.  Standards for SQL never really addressed the need for boolean data -- it was assumed that some other data type could easily just step in and address this need.  The result was a lot of different data models for boolean values.  Here are some examples. TRUE or FALSE T or F Y or N 1 or 0 <any value> vs NULL The internet shows the debate has gone on , even as SQL standards have changed .  Coming from a professional background with Oracle, I struggled with this across my teams because everyone had a different opinion, which led to a lot of time wasted due to debate. This said, I appreciate working with native queries in hibernate's JPA implementation against MySQL.  MySQL supports a BIT data type I recently discussed .  When we represent data in MySQL with BIT and restrict the length to just 1 (ie 1 bit), Hibernate JPA magically knows to query and return this data as a Boolean in the ...