Eclipse just saved me a couple hours’ work… Thanks to a series of admittedly bad decisions, I had a unit test chock full of call chains like this:

assertEquals("West", hc.getAreaInfo().getAttractions().getAttraction().get(3).getRefPoints().getRefPoint().get(0).getDirection());
assertEquals("Name", hc.getAreaInfo().getAttractions().getAttraction().get(3).getRefPoints().getRefPoint().get(0).getName());
assertEquals("20",   hc.getAreaInfo().getAttractions().getAttraction().get(3).getRefPoints().getRefPoint().get(0).getTransportations().getTransportation().get(0).getTransportationCode());
//...etc

….too embarrassing to let a colleague see. So I was resigned to spending a very boring midday importing the appropriate classes and assigning those values to local variables, when it occurred to me to check Eclipse’s Refactor menu…

And there I found “Extract local variable”. What a godsend. All I had to do was highlight the section of the call chain I wanted, and it (intelligently) chose a variable name, replaced all occurrences with the variable, and even imported the classes I needed. In just a few minutes the above code and everything like it was changed to this:

com.mycompany.ota.generated.AreaInfoType.Attractions.Attraction attraction = hc.getAreaInfo().getAttractions().getAttraction().get(3);
RefPoint refPoint = attraction.getRefPoints().getRefPoint().get(0);
assertEquals("West", refPoint.getDirection());
assertEquals("Name", refPoint.getName());
assertEquals("20",   refPoint.getTransportations().getTransportation().get(0).getTransportationCode());
//...etc

Java is a very bad language, and Eclipse is what was created to cope with it. Fortunately, its creators exhibit boundless ingenuity.