How to test actors with components injected by Guice in Play! scala 2.5

Question

I'm using Guice to inject components inside an actor as it is explained in the Play! Scala 2.5 documentation .
In my application, I inject unshortLinksFactory: UnshortLinks.Factory in my classes and I create a new actor like this:

val unshortLinksActor = actorSystem.actorOf(Props(unshortLinksFactory(ws)))

The problem is that I cannot inject components in my test class (can I?) otherwise the test are not started. (Please note that I use Scalatest.)

How can I create the actor in my tests? It's fine if I can create it like:

val unshortLinksActor = system.actorOf(Props(unshortLinksFactory(ws)))

but the best would be to be able to create it with TestActorRef from Akka.testKit in order to have access to the underlyingActor .

Answer 1

What I do in order to test it is:

I extends the test class with TestKit(ActorSystem("testSystem")) .

Then I create the Props like this:

  lazy val unshortLinkFactoryProps = Props(unshortLinkFactory(
    dbConfigProvider = dbConfProvider)

Here dbConfProvider is created like this but could also be mocked:

  lazy val appBuilder = new GuiceApplicationBuilder()
  lazy val injector = appBuilder.injector()
  lazy val dbConfProvider = injector.instanceOf[DatabaseConfigProvider]

Finally I can have an actorRef like this:

val actorRef = TestActorRef[UnshortLinksActor](unshortLinksFactoryProps)

And I can access the methods inside my actor with actorRef.underlyingActor .