Hard coding a URI makes it difficult to test a program: path literals are not always portable across operating systems, a given absolute path may
not exist on a specific test environment, a specified Internet URL may not be available when executing the tests, production environment filesystems
usually differ from the development environment, …etc. For all those reasons, a URI should never be hard coded. Instead, it should be replaced by
customizable parameter.
Further even if the elements of a URI are obtained dynamically, portability can still be limited if the path-delimiters are hard-coded.
This rule raises an issue when URI’s or path delimiters are hard coded.
Noncompliant Code Example
public class Foo {
public Collection<User> listUsers() {
File userList = new File("/home/mylogin/Dev/users.txt"); // Noncompliant
Collection<User> users = parse(userList);
return users;
}
}
Compliant Solution
public class Foo {
// Configuration is a class that returns customizable properties: it can be mocked to be injected during tests.
private Configuration config;
public Foo(Configuration myConfig) {
this.config = myConfig;
}
public Collection<User> listUsers() {
// Find here the way to get the correct folder, in this case using the Configuration object
String listingFolder = config.getProperty("myApplication.listingFolder");
// and use this parameter instead of the hard coded path
File userList = new File(listingFolder, "users.txt"); // Compliant
Collection<User> users = parse(userList);
return users;
}
}
See
