Current behavior

Problem

Before#699, every static field touched outsideclinit block (so-calledmeaningful static fields) was stored inmodelBefore andmodelAfter and accordingly was set (and correspondingly reset for tests isolation) in code generation part. Such behavior led to unexpected for user explicit static field initialiazations - for example, settingEMPTY static field fromOptional class for the following method under test:

publicOptional<Integer>optionalExample(booleanisEmpty) {returnisEmpty ?Optional.empty() :Optional.of(42);}

like:

setStaticField(optionalClazz,"EMPTY",empty);

Such behavior is mostly strange for a user and should be properly fixed - we should not set such static fields with initializers manually.

Current colution

After merging#699, we do not explicitly set static fields of classes from so-calledtrusted libraries (be default represents JDK packages), accordingly toorg.utbot.framework.UtSettings#getIgnoreStaticsFromTrustedLibraries setting. But such a solution possibly leads to coverage regression, need to be investigated (#716). So, there are a few other ways to fix such a problem with static fields.

Solutions

Use concrete values as soft constraints

The essense of the problem is assigning values for static fields that would be already set in runtime. So, to prevent it we can try to create models for static fields according to theirs runtime values and filter out statics that are equal to runtime values, with the following algorithm:

1. Extract concrete value for a static field.
2. CreateUtModel for this value and store it.
3. Transform produced model to soft constraints.
4. Add them to the current symbolic state.
5. After resolvingstateBefore compare resultedUtModel for the static field with the stored model and drop resulted model out fromstateBefore in case theirs equality.

Propagate reading of static fields

We can change a bit sense of themeaningful statics - mark static fields as meaningful only if they affect a result of the method under test. To decide it, we can propagate such knowledge with the following algorithm:

1. Store for each statement, does it reads a specific static value or not.
2. Traversing a graph of the method, propagate these stores for the each statement.
3. After reaching areturn statement of the method under test, mark all propagated static fields as meaningful.

Filter out statics byUtExecution affecting (*)

After collecting all the executions, we can analyze them and for every static field check whether this affects a result. Briefly, if the static field value never changes in all executions, it means this value does not affect the result at all and can be dropped outOR it is required for all executions like an entering point (if statement as a first statement in the method under test, for example):

publicvoidthrowIfMagic() {if (ClassWithStaticField.staticField ==42) {thrownewRuntimeException("Magic number");    }}

(*) This solution should only be used withpropagation