Spring testing on steriods

Recently I was involved in another Spring powered Java project and noticed a lot of test specific xml configuration floating around. Typically this is done because (for instance) datasources and such that are not available via JNDI outside a container. Problem that I have with the specific xml configuration is that it is maintenance intensive and well it is more xml… Luckily you almost never have to create the specific XML files to be able to test your application context outside a container.

Let’s say we have a datasource configured in Spring like this:

[xml]

[/xml]

Instead of extracting this into a separate config file and combining those manually you can bind a datasource in your JUnit test using the SimpleNamingContextBuilder provided in the spring-test module. A datasource is easily created using the EmbeddedDatabaseBuilder.

A datasource is of course an easy example. What about the a Transaction Manager, or even worse the EntityManager (nice quote from a colleague: everything that uses the META-INF directory is suspicious). Even these are possible without having to duplicate the world. A complete test will look something like this.

[java]
public class SpringContextTest {
private EmbeddedDatabase dataSource;
private SimpleNamingContextBuilder contextBuilder;
private FileSystemXmlApplicationContext applicationContext;
@Before
public void setUp() throws NamingException {
dataSource = new EmbeddedDatabaseBuilder().setType(EmbeddedDatabaseType.HSQL).setName(“springtestdb”).build();
contextBuilder = SimpleNamingContextBuilder.emptyActivatedContextBuilder();
contextBuilder.bind(“java:jdbc/myDataSource”, dataSource);
contextBuilder.bind(“java:comp/UserTransaction”, new J2eeUserTransaction());
contextBuilder.bind(“persistence/MyPersistenceUnit”, createEntityManagerFactory());
}

private EntityManagerFactory createEntityManagerFactory() {
Map properties = new HashMap();
properties.put(“hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto”, “create-drop”);
properties.put(“javax.persistence.transactionType”, “RESOURCE_LOCAL”);
EntityManagerFactory entityManagerFactory = Persistence.createEntityManagerFactory(“MyPersistenceUnit”, properties);
return entityManagerFactory;
}

@After
public void tearDown() {
dataSource.shutdown();
contextBuilder.deactivate();
if(applicationContext != null) {
applicationContext.close();
}
}

@Test
public void springContextValid() throws Exception {
applicationContext = new FileSystemXmlApplicationContext(“application-context.xml”);
assertTrue(“success”, true);
}
}

[/java]

And the relevant xml part:

[xml]




[/xml]

By using the full power of the spring test module you can make testing your spring application context a lot easier.