Testing is always a sore spot in many applications, and Grails is no exception, but mocking objects and methods is actually not as bad as you think. Here is a simple way to mock the Hibernate Criteria object that is available from Grails domain classes.
Example:
If this is the code that you want to test, and for this particular test you want to have no results, this how you would mock it out.
Code:
Test Code:
The key piece of code is the creation of the bookCriteria object, in this case it is a member of the test class that is why it is not declared locally in the function. However, you will notice that the bookCriteria is simply a HashMap that returns a empty list for the 'list' parameter. This way when testing 'c.list' a empty list will be returned. Simple hunh!