Maven modules and Spring test resources

Question

I have a Maven project made up of several modules. Some of the modules depend on the other modules for example Module C <- Module B <- Module A. Module C depends on Module B which depends on Module A.

In each module, I have Spring config files in main/resources and test/resources, those under test are for unit testing, while the those under main are for release/production. Each config file is self contained - Module B contained only its Spring config (file names are like so foo-B.xml, foo-A.xml)

However, when I need to test Module C, I need to reference Module B's Spring config under test/resources, but what is included is Module B's main/resources config file. This presents a problem because the production file has references to JNDI datasources where test one does not.

How can I get Maven or Spring to reference the test configuration file from the module dependency?

Answer 1

Maven separates the source classes & resources from the test classes & resources. You may configure Module B to create a test jar using the maven-jar-plugin test-jar goal . Then, you may have Module C reference Module B's test code as a dependency.

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.myCompany</groupId>
    <artifactId>moduleB</artifactId>
    <version>${project.version}</version>
    <classifier>tests</classifier>
    <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>

Alternately, you can create a regular Maven project including only the test code you'd like to share, then include that as a test dependency where needed. This idea is described in the maven jar plugin's usage docs .

Answer 2

I'm not sure this can be done. Maven deliberately does not include test resources in artifacts. If I were in your place, I would duplicate the test resources in module C. Presumably, you're not testing the same things in both modules, so hopefully it won't cause a bad case of copy&paste/dual-maintenance.

As an aside, I try to avoid having "production" data sources and "test" data sources. Use the same JNDI name for both, but have the JNDI provider configured to point to test or production based on the circumstance. For example, all of our web servers have the same data sources defined, but the JDBC urls are different for dev/qa/prod. For your unit tests, use something like simple-jndi to simulate a JNDI environment.