Easier Unit Testing in Spring

If you are using the Spring Framework, you should using Spring’s JUnit-based testing framework. See their docs for details. I’ll try to do a summary for the rest of what it is and why you would want to use it instead of plain JUnit.

Here is a skeleton of the unit test class:

// AbstractDependencyInjectionSpringContextTests is in spring-mock.jarpublic class TestMyClass extends AbstractDependencyInjectionSpringContextTests {

    // classID must match the a bean ID in your Spring Configuration    protected MyClass classID;

    // use the constructor just like the setUp method in JUnit

    public TestMyClass() {        // this will populate all the protected objects        setPopulateProtectedVariables(true);        // this will find the class by name (i.e. bean ID) as opposed

        // to class-type        setAutowireMode(AbstractDependencyInjectionSpringContextTests.AUTOWIRE_BY_NAME);

    }

  // this tells this class where to find the Spring configuration  protected String[] getConfigLocations() {        return new String[] { "classpath:appConfig.xml" };    }

  //** put your tests here

  public void testNormal(){   classID.someMethod();  // ....

}

The AbstractDependencyInjectionSpringContextTests that TestMyClass extends has some very cool features. As the comments in the class above state, the protected classID object will automatically be populated with a new MyClass object – no need to fetch an ApplicationContext, get a bean, cast it, and then test it. If you want an ApplicationContext, the AbstractDependencyInjectionSpringContextTests gives you an instance called applicationContext that already is instantiated.
Did I mention that AbstractDependencyInjectionSpringContextTests is actually a subclass of JUnit’s TestCase? So you can still use the unit testing functionality in Eclipse and the junit tasks in ant.

I haven’t messed with it yet, but Spring also has an object called AbstractTransactionalDataSourceSpringContextTests that lets you poke around at the database within a test, rollback transactions, etc. Read more about it in the Spring Docs.

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