How to override the behavior of Spring @Autowired

Question

A little background:

I am Using Spring 2.5, and specifically Spring IOC and annotations.

I am using @Autowired in my code (the Autowiring is don

Answer 1

I know this question is quite old but a I think an answer might still be useful for others.

Since you probably do not want to mix both Foo and MockFoo within your context, I would suggest to remove Foo from the component-scanning. This could be done for example by specifying include/exclude filters on the <context:component-scan>.

However if you are implementing unit tests, I would rather suggest not using a Spring context and just implementing "pure" unit tests by injecting mock-ups of the dependencies manually, so that you are only testing a single class. This can be achieved more easily by using a mocking framework like Mockito.

Answer 2

I agree with Didier. Here is an example of how you can exclude the implementations that you want to mock in your test application context.

<context:component-scan base-package="com.company" >
    <context:exclude-filter type="regex" expression="com\.abc\.service\.XDaoImpl"/>    
</context:component-scan>

Include this application context in your test as follows :

@RunWith(SpringJUnit4ClassRunner.class)
@ContextConfiguration(locations={"classpath:/applicationContext-test.xml"})
public class MyTest {....}

Answer 3

Use ReflectionTestUtils to manually set the Mock in place of the autowired dependency (for that purpose your mock must not be spring managed, so that no ambiguity exists)