Physics animations are notoriously difficult to test, since they’re essentially small simulations. They have no set duration, and they’re considered ‘finished’ only when the movements imparted by the animation are too small to be user-visible. Mid-states are not deterministic.
For this reason, we only test the end state of animations. Manual testing should be sufficient to reveal flaws in the en-route animation visuals. In a worst-case failure case, as long as the end state is correct, usability will not be affected - animations might just look a bit off until the UI elements settle to their proper positions.
Testing any kind of animation can be tricky, since animations need to run on the main thread, and they’re asynchronous - the test has to wait for the animation to finish before we can assert anything about its end state. For normal animations, we can invoke skipToEnd to avoid waiting. While this method is available for SpringAnimation, it’s not available for FlingAnimation since its end state is not initially known. A FlingAnimation’s ‘end’ is when the friction simulation reports that motion has slowed to an invisible level. For this reason, we have to actually run the physics animations.
To accommodate this, all tests of the layout itself, as well as any animation controller subclasses, use PhysicsAnimationLayoutTestCase. The layout provided to controllers by the test case is a TestablePhysicsAnimationLayout, a subclass of PhysicsAnimationLayout whose animation-related methods have been overridden to force them to run on the main thread via a Handler. Animations will simply crash if they’re called directly from the test thread, so this is important.
The test case also provides waitForPropertyAnimations, which uses a CountDownLatch to wait for all animations on a given property to complete before continuing the test. This works since the test is not running on the same thread as the animation, so a blocking call to latch.await() does not affect the animations’ progress. The latch is initialized with a count equal to the number of properties we’re listening to. We then add end listeners to the layout for each property, which call latch.countDown(). Once all of the properties’ animations have completed, the latch count reaches zero and the test’s call to await() returns, with the animations complete.