Do not stop test execution on XCTAssertThrowsSpecific

Question

Using XCTest, a test does the following:

XCTAssertThrowsSpecificNamed([does something that breaks], NSException, NSInvalidArgumentException);

I don't want the debugger to stop on the NSException that I know will occur but I want it to still stop on other exceptions that might occur.

Answer 1

Basically we don't have a choice. I still consider it an xCode bug because you already told xCode an exception will be thrown, and what exception it will be. Why provide XCTAssertThrows if it's an exception you're not "expecting"? Obviously it's for exceptions you are expecting, which @nhgrif argues should be an error, not an exception. Might be a good point, but i do want my program to crash if this case ever happens, because I can't handle it.

So the real question is more why not disable the debugger on that exception only? Probably because they haven't gotten around to it. I'd suggest opening a bug/feature request with Apple. I'd love for someone to contradict me on this (please comment!) but until then, I'll live with this issue (disable debugger when running all my tests).

--> https://stackoverflow.com/a/22393643/1701430

"Why does the test stop when the execution is thrown?" Because you have a breakpoint, which stops execution.

"Why, after removing the breakpoint, does my application crash when the exception is thrown?" Because you have an unhandled exception. Unhandled exceptions cause your program to crash.

"How can I handle an exception so it won't crash my program?" The easy answer to this question is to simply NOT throw an exception. In other programming languages, like Java, this is perfectly standard. But in Objective-C, we don't really do exceptions. In Objective-C, exceptions should be saved for TRULY exceptional behavior.

With that said, and a strong suggestion for you to find another way to handle whatever it is you're trying to handle, this is how you handle an exception in Objective-C:

@try {
    // code that could throw an exception
}

@catch (NSException *e) {
    // handle the exception...
}

@finally {
    // post try-catch code, executed every time
}