Spring: unit and integration tests

Question

I\'m looking for best practices for setting up unit and integration tests using Spring.

I usually use 3 kind of tests:

• \"real\" unit tests (no dependen

Answer 1

I extended the GenericXmlContextLoader

public class MyContextLoader extends GenericXmlContextLoader {

and overrote the

protected String[] generateDefaultLocations(Class clazz)

method to collect the config file names of a directory which I can specify by a SystemProperty (-Dtest.config=).

I also modified the follwowing method to NOT modify any locations

@Override
protected String[] modifyLocations(Class clazz, String... locations) {
    return locations;
}

I use this context loader like this

@RunWith(SpringJUnit4ClassRunner.class)
@ContextConfiguration(loader = MyContextLoader.class)
public class Test { .... }

Running the test with a SystemProperty indicating the source of the config files enables you now to use completely different configurations.

The usage of a SystemProperty is of course only one strategy to specify the configuration location. You can do whatever you want in generateDefaultLocations().

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EDIT:

This solution enables you to use complete different application context configurations (e.g. for mock objects) and not only different properties. You do not need a build step to deploy everything to your "classpath" location. My concrete implementation also used the users name as default to look for a configuration directory (src/test/resources/{user}) if no system property is given (makes it easy to maintain specific test environments for all developers on the project).

The usage of the PropertyPlaceholder ist still possible and recommended.

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EDIT:

Spring Version 3.1.0 will support XML profiles/Environment Abstraction which is similar to my solution and will enable the choice of configuration files for different environments/profiles.