How to write Transactional Unit Tests for Transactional Methods in Spring?

Question

The Unit-Test Classes I have in my Project extend an AbstractUnitTest class which is @Transactional . The tests in these classes are running on some methods which themselves are @Transactional .

Whenever these methods bring tested fail, instead of rolling back, the Transactions are partially persisted ( in the Testing Environment, ordinarily they behave atomically ). This is preventing me from testing Transactional behavior of my Project Modules.

More specifically , I have a Unit-Test for an addList() method. However, on encountering an Exception, during unit-testing, the input list is partially added and not rolled back since , the test is itself running in a Transaction(by virtue of AbstractUnitTest being Transactional)

On removing the @Transactional from AbstractUnitTest , the tests work fine. What is the reason for this behavior and how can you perform unit-testing of Transactional methods if the Unit Test class itself is Transactional?

Answer 1

that depends on your configuration I think: if you want to start a transaction you need to configure a TransactionManager for your unit testing. As you use Spring make sure this is configured and the transaction boundaries (begin/commit or rollback) are defined to ensure the transactional behavior (rollback upon error).

My advice is anyway to use TransactionalTestExecutionListener to always rollback after each test: in this way each test is independent as it always runs with the same data.

Hope this helps.

Beppe