JUnit needs special permissions? - maven

Question

My builds have been failing due to some of the integration tests I've been running. I'm stuck on why it won't work. Here is an example of the output:
I'm using Maven to first build, then it calls the JUnit tests. I'm seeing this 401 Unauthorized message in every single test, and I believe that's what is causing the builds to fail. In my mind, this means there are some permissions / authentication parameters that need to be set. Where would I go about doing this in JUnit?
Edit
#Test
public void testXmlHorsesNonRunners() throws Exception {
String servletUrl = SERVER + "sd/date/2013-01-13/horses/nonrunners";
Document results = issueRequest(servletUrl, APPLICATION_XML, false);
assertNotNull(results);
// debugDocument(results, "NonRunners");
String count = getXPathStringValue(
"string(count(hrdg:data/hrdg:meeting/hrdg:event/hrdg:nonrunner/hrdg:selection))",
results);
assertEquals("non runners", "45", count);
}
If you can, try to ignore the detail. Effectively, this is making a request. This is a sample of a test that uses the issueRequest method. This method is what makes HTTP requests. (This is a big method, which is why I didn't post it originally. I'll try to make it as readable as possible.
logger.info("Sending request: " + servletUrl);
HttpGet httpGet = null;
// InputStream is = null;
DefaultHttpClient httpclient = null;
try {
httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient();
doFormLogin(httpclient, servletUrl, acceptMime, isIrishUser);
httpGet = new HttpGet(servletUrl);
httpGet.addHeader("accept", acceptMime);
// but more importantly now add the user agent header
setUserAgent(httpGet, acceptMime);
logger.info("executing request" + httpGet.getRequestLine());
// Execute the request
HttpResponse response = httpclient.execute(httpGet);
// Examine the response status
StatusLine statusLine = response.getStatusLine();
logger.info(statusLine);
switch (statusLine.getStatusCode()) {
case 401:
throw new HttpResponseException(statusLine.getStatusCode(),
"Unauthorized");
case 403:
throw new HttpResponseException(statusLine.getStatusCode(),
"Forbidden");
case 404:
throw new HttpResponseException(statusLine.getStatusCode(),
"Not Found");
default:
if (300 < statusLine.getStatusCode()) {
throw new HttpResponseException(statusLine.getStatusCode(),
"Unexpected Error");
}
}
// Get hold of the response entity
HttpEntity entity = response.getEntity();
Document doc = null;
if (entity != null) {
InputStream instream = entity.getContent();
try {
// debugContent(instream);
doc = documentBuilder.parse(instream);
} catch (IOException ex) {
// In case of an IOException the connection will be released
// back to the connection manager automatically
throw ex;
} catch (RuntimeException ex) {
// In case of an unexpected exception you may want to abort
// the HTTP request in order to shut down the underlying
// connection and release it back to the connection manager.
httpGet.abort();
throw ex;
} finally {
// Closing the input stream will trigger connection release
instream.close();
}
}
return doc;
} finally {
// Release the connection.
closeConnection(httpclient);
}

Answer 1

I notice that your test output shows HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error a couple of lines before the 401 error. I wonder if the root cause could be hiding in there. If I were you I'd try looking for more details about what error happened on the server at that point in the test, to see if it could be responsible for the authentication problem (maybe the failure is in a login controller of some sort, or is causing a session to be cancelled?)
Alternately: it looks like you're using the Apache HttpClient library to do the request, inside the issueRequest method. If you need to include authentication credentials in the request, that would be the code you'd need to change. Here's an example of doing HTTP Basic authentication in HttpClient, if that helps. (And more examples, if that one doesn't.)
(I'd second the observation that this problem probably isn't specific to JUnit. If you need to do more research, I'd suggest learning more about HttpClient, and about what this app expects the browser to send. One possibility: use something like Chrome Dev Tools to peek at your communications with the server when you do this manually, and see if there's anything important that the test isn't doing, or is doing differently.
Once you've figured out how to login, it might make sense to do it in a #Before method in your JUnit test.)

Answer 2

HTTP permission denied has nothing to do with JUnit. You probably need to set your credentials while making the request in the code itself. Show us some code.
Also, unit testing is not really meant to access the internet. Its purpose is for testing small, concise parts of your code which shouldn't rely on any external factors. Integration tests should cover that.
If you can, try to mock your network requests using EasyMock or PowerMock and make them return a resource you would load from your local resources folder (e.g. test/resources).