Mockito + Spy: How to gather return values

I got a class using a factory for creating some object. In my unit test I would like to access the return value of the factory. Since the factory is directly passed to the class and no getter for the created object is provided I need to intercept returning the object from the factory.

RealFactory factory     = new RealFactory();
RealFactory spy         = spy(factory);
TestedClass testedClass = new TestedClass(factory);

// At this point I would like to get a reference to the object created
// and returned by the factory.

Is there a possibility to access the return value of the factory? Probably using the spy?
The only way I can see is to mock the factory create method.

Solution

First thing, you should be passing spy in as the constructor argument.

That aside, here's how you could do it.

public class ResultCaptor<T> implements Answer {
    private T result = null;
    public T getResult() {
        return result;
    }

    @Override
    public T answer(InvocationOnMock invocationOnMock) throws Throwable {
        result = (T) invocationOnMock.callRealMethod();
        return result;
    }
}

Intended usage:

RealFactory factory     = new RealFactory();
RealFactory spy         = spy(factory);
TestedClass testedClass = new TestedClass(spy);

// At this point I would like to get a reference to the object created
// and returned by the factory.


// let's capture the return values from spy.create()
ResultCaptor<RealThing> resultCaptor = new ResultCaptor<>();
doAnswer(resultCaptor).when(spy).create();

// do something that will trigger a call to the factory
testedClass.doSomething();

// validate the return object
assertThat(resultCaptor.getResult())
        .isNotNull()
        .isInstanceOf(RealThing.class);