Reload or refresh a Spring application context inside a test method?

Question

I need to change the Spring profiles that are active in my applicationContext within a single method of my test class, and to do so I need to run one line of code before ref

Answer 1

There's a nice little hack to trigger a context refresh - to use org.springframework.cloud.context.refresh.ContextRefresher.

I'm not 100% sure this method will suite you: it requires a spring-cloud-context dependency. However, this may be added just as a test dependency and not leak into production classpath.

To use this refresher you also need to import org.springframework.cloud.autoconfigure.RefreshAutoConfiguration configuration, which adds a RefreshScope scope to your applicationContext which is actually doing the job under the hood.

So, modify test as follows:

import org.junit.Test;
import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired;
import org.springframework.cloud.autoconfigure.RefreshAutoConfiguration;
import org.springframework.cloud.context.refresh.ContextRefresher;    
// your other imports


@WebAppConfiguration
@ContextConfiguration(locations = {"/web/WEB-INF/spring.xml"}, classes = RefreshAutoConfiguration.class)
@ActiveProfiles(resolver = BaseActiveProfilesResolverTest.class)
public class ControllerTest extends AbstractTestNGSpringContextTests {

    @Autowired
    private ContextRefresher contextRefresher;

    @Test
    public void test() throws Exception {
        // doSmth before
        contextRefresher.refresh();
        // context is refreshed - continue testing
    }

}