Spring Test Configurations

Question

I'm fairly new to Spring and my understanding is a bit scratchy so bear with me and word answers for an idiot.

I've started working on a relatively large, maven based project which has a load of (xml) spring configuration. For this we have a bunch of JUnit tests. At the moment spring configuration for the tests replaces the configuration for the core project modules, which is an issue because it means that if we make changes to the configuration of the main project then those changes aren't reflected in the test module and hence it's possible to get funny test results.

We are currently changing this structure so that the test module configuration overrides (rather than replaces) the main modules configuration. So we only have to override the particular beans we are interested in for each tests.

Is this the best way to do this? Are there alternative ways? Is it possible to fine tune this ever further so that you can override specific setters of a particular bean (rather than the entire bean) for tests?

Any advice is much appreciated.

Answer 1

Ow having to mess with the method to test it is a bit weird by it self in my opinion.

I would avoid that at all if possible, and use spring resources to help you, with dependency injection, different application-contexts for test and dev and mock frameworks you can test almost every thing I can think of.

Maybe you could try to use those.

An example, it's a bit hard to simulate an user security context, but with spring it becomes fairly easy, you just need to create an application-context.xml for the tests (and point to it) and assign a factory in it to create a Bean of Authentication type(it's an interface) and you can use easy mock to automate this bean responses.

But for that to work you have to build your code with that in mind so instead of calling SecurityContext.getContext.... you inject that Authentication Bean from the factory.

Answer 2

In your main configuration separate out all the environment dependent configuration (like datasource, jms connectionfactory etc) to a separate config file - (something like infrastructure-config.xml). The configuration that doesn't change across test & deploy goes into a different file - application-config.xml.

Now for the test only create a new version of the infrastructure config file - test-infrastructure-config.xml and use it with the application-config from the main.

Answer 3

You can split your main configuration in separate (logical) units and import them into your test configuration as needed.

Keep in mind that Spring 3.1 will introduce XML profiles. This is perfect for testing (with different enviroment specific configurations). It's not finally released yet but I would (and do) use the milestone in new projects.