Spring Jar version with spring-test

Question

I am writing some JUnits for a Spring application, the Spring version used for which is

    <spring.version>3.2.8.RELEASE</spring.version>

the dependencies are defined as

    <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-test</artifactId>
            <version>${spring.version}</version>
    </dependency>

    <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-core</artifactId>
            <version>${spring.version}</version>
    </dependency>

then in my JUnit test i am using the annotations as

@RunWith(SpringJUnit4ClassRunner.class)
@ContextConfiguration(locations="classpath:config/test-application-context-datasource.xml")

When i am trying to execute the test case it fails to initialize, ie it doesn't even goes into the @Before method and throws below exception:

java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/springframework/core/type/AnnotatedTypeMetadata
    at org.springframework.test.context.support.AbstractGenericContextLoader.loadContext(AbstractGenericContextLoader.java:118)

AnnotatedTypeMetadata is only available after spring release 4.10.0 i believe, but since i am not using that anywhere in my application and the version of my spring-test and spring-core is same, why is this even getting referred.

Any thoughts?

Answer 1

You obviously have incompatible versions of various Spring JARs on your classpath.

To figure out which incompatible versions (ie, other than 3.2.8.RELEASE ) are present in your classpath, execute mvn dependency:tree in your project's folder.

Then ensure that you avoid having the incompatible versions on your classpath -- for example, by adding exclusions to your Maven POM for any dependencies that are pulling in the unwanted versions as transitive dependencies.