Eclipse: The type org.hamcrest.core.CombinableMatcher$CombinableBothMatcher cannot be resolved. It is indirectly referenced from required .class files

Question

I was working on a unit testing for a Spring MVC controller using TestNG and Mockito. I've included Hamcrest library in the Maven dependencies as shown below. What am I missing here? The error shows up when I use the following two methods:

org.hamcrest.Matchers.hasSize;
org.hamcrest.Matchers.is;

The following are my dependencies:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.testng</groupId>
    <artifactId>testng</artifactId>
    <version>6.9.4</version>
    <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.mockito</groupId>
    <artifactId>mockito-core</artifactId>
    <version>1.10.8</version>
    <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.hamcrest</groupId>
    <artifactId>hamcrest-library</artifactId>
    <version>1.3</version>
    <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>

UPDATE 1:

The problem has been resolved by changing hamcrest-library to hamcrest-all.

    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.hamcrest</groupId>
        <artifactId>hamcrest-all</artifactId>
        <version>1.3</version>
        <scope>test</scope>
    </dependency>

UPDATE 2:

As per suggested by Tunaki, the better solution would be to exclude the transitive dependency hamcrest-core from mockito library. So the final dependencies should look something like as follows:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.mockito</groupId>
    <artifactId>mockito-core</artifactId>
    <version>1.10.8</version>
    <scope>test</scope>
    <exclusions>
        <exclusion>
            <groupId>org.hamcrest</groupId>
            <artifactId>hamcrest-core</artifactId>
        </exclusion>
    </exclusions>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.hamcrest</groupId>
    <artifactId>hamcrest-library</artifactId>
    <version>1.3</version>
    <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>

Answer 1

There is a dependency conflict in your POM:

• mockito-core 1.10.8 depends on hamcrest-core 1.1.
• hamcrest-library 1.3 depends on hamcrest-core 1.3.

Maven resolves the conflict by selecting version 1.1 (it is declared first and they have equal path).

You are getting this error because hamcrest-library 1.3 references the CombinableMatcher class that did not exist in version 1.1 but does exist in version 1.3.

If you really depend on Hamcrest 1.3 specific features, you need to exclude hamcrest-core transitive dependency from mockito-core (and hope Hamcrest 1.3 is backwards compatible with 1.1). Otherwise, just remove hamcrest-library and you will then depend on Hamcrest 1.1.