Unit testing with Mockito - spring

Question

I am writing unit tests for service layer in my spring application.
Here is my service class
#Service
public class StubRequestService implements RequestService {
#Autowired
private RequestDao requestDao;
#Transactional(propagation = Propagation.REQUIRED, readOnly = true)
#Override
public Request getRequest(Long RequestId) {
Request dataRequest = requestDao.find(requestId);
return dataRequest;
}
}
Here is my test class
#RunWith(MockitoJUnitRunner.class)
#ContextConfiguration(locations = { "/META-INF/spring/applicationContext.xml" })
public class StubRequestServiceTest {
#Mock
public RequestDao requestDao;
StubRequestService stubRequestService; // How can we Autowire this ?
#org.junit.Before
public void init() {
stubRequestService = new StubRequestService(); // to avoid this
stubRequestService.setRequestDao(dataRequestDao);
// Is it necessary to explicitly set all autowired elements ?
// If I comment/remove above setter then I get nullPointerException
}
#Test
public void testGetRequest() {
Request request = new Request();
request.setPatientCnt("3");
when(requestDao.find(anyLong())).thenReturn(request);
assertEquals(stubRequestService.getRequest(1234L).getPatientCnt(),3);
}
}
Its working fine but I have few questions
How can we Autowire service class in test ? I am using constructor in init() method to create service object.
Do we have to set all Autowire element for service class ? For ex StubRequestService have autowired RequestDao which I need to set explicitly before calling test method otherwise it giveds nullPointerException as requestDao is null in StubRequestService.getRequest method.
Which are the good practices to follow while unit testing Spring service layer ? (If I am doing anything wrong).

Answer 1

Your test is fine. It doesn't even have to have the #ContextConfiguration annotation.
The whole point of dependency injection frameworks like Spring is to be able to unit test services by simply instantiating them, setting mock dependencies, and then call their methods.
You're doing it correctly. You don't need to have a Spring context for such unit tests. That's why they're called unit tests: they test it in isolation of all their actual dependencies, Spring included.
Side note: assuming you're using JUnit, the arguments of the assertXxx method should be swapped. The expected value comes before the actual value. It becomes important when the assertion fails and you have a message like "expecting 6 but was 3" rather than "expecting 3 but was 6".

Answer 2

If you really feel that it will make your tests easier to understand - you can initialize a spring context and fetch all of the objects from there. However, usually it will require creating a separate spring configuration XML file specifically for tests therefore I would not recommend it.
ApplicationContext applicationContext = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("testApplicationContext.xml");
stubRequestService = (RequestService)applicationContext.getBean("myRequestServiceBean");
(and 3) Basically, I prefer testing each component of my application in total isolation from eachother and that's why I do not recommend what I described in [1].
What that means, is you take a separate logical slice of your application and test only it, while fully mocking up everything it tries to access.
Let's say you have three classes:
//Fetches stuff from some webservice and converts to your app domain POJOs
class DataAccessLayer {
public void setWebservice(Webservice ws) {...};
public MyObject getMyObject() {...};
}
//Formats the domain POJOs and sends them to some kind of outputstream or stuff.
class ViewLayer {
public void setOutputStream(OutputStream os) {...};
public void viewMyObject(MyObject mo) {...};
}
//Main entry point of our MyObject fetch-process-display workflow
class Controller {
public void setDataAccessLayer(DataAccessLayer dal) {...};
public void setViewLayer(ViewLayer vl) {...};
public void showMyObject() {
MyObject mo = dal.getMyObject();
...some processing here maybe...
vl.viewMyObject(mo);
}
}
Now, what tests can we write here?
Test if DataAccessLayer properly converts the object from mocked up WS to our domain object.
Test if ViewLayer properly formats the object given to him and writes it to mocked up output stream.
Test if Controller takes an object from mocked up DataAccessLayer processes it properly and sends it to mocked up ViewLayer.

Answer 3

Or You can use springockito
https://bitbucket.org/kubek2k/springockito/wiki/Home, it will make your tests cleaner