Skip to main content

Spring 4: Unit Testing Classic Controller

Spring Boot is a great gift for all Spring developers. The productivity boost is enormous. It also makes it extremely easy to unit tests slices of your layered application. This feature is available from Spring Boot 1.4.x onwards. In this post, I am going to focus only on unit testing of Spring MVC classic controller i.e non-REST controller.

Spring Boot test slice support for MVC controller is enabled by the following annotation


This tells Spring MVC test framework that we only intend to test EmployeeController So it will only make the web MVC components (controllers, interceptors etc) available with mocking support. For more details of this annotation please refer to the Javadoc here.

In the example above, we are testing the request to copy the Employee. Mockito is used to create and inject the mock objects. Spring takes care of the mock objects, dependencies for us. This makes it extremely easy to write unit tests for classic Spring MVC controllers. Note that for quick feedback unit tests must be cheap i.e quick to develop, setup and execute. This goal is achieved very easily with this setup.

 Beware

However, the Spring MVC controller test has one drawback. In this scenario, you would want to just test the functionality of the controller method by actually simulating the request/response cycle. This is done perfectly by Spring MVC test framework. However, it also loads/generates the view. In other words, it takes the logical view name from  ModelAndView object generates HTML content. This can potentially slow down the unit test execution time. This is also redundant as you will not be interested in testing the content of the HTML when testing for a controller (this can be done by Thyemeleaf test framework). In order to circumvent this limitation, I have added a blank test Thymeleaf template. Given this limitation, it will be very nice if Spring provides a switch/configuration to turn off the view generation. Github repository for this project is available at

Github Repo :

https://github.com/kdhrubo/playground
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part 3 - Integrating Tiles, Thymeleaf and Spring MVC 3

In this post I will demonstrate how to integrate Apache Tiles with Thymeleaf. This is very simple. The first step is to include the tiles and thymeleaf-tiles extension dependencies. I will include them in the pom.xml. Note we wil lbe using Tiles 2.2.2 Listing 1 - parent/pom.xml --- thymeleaf-tiles and tiles dependencies <!-- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ --> <!-- Tiles --> <!-- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ --> <dependency> <groupId>org.apache.tiles</groupId> <artifactId>tiles-core</artifactId> <version>${tiles.version}</version> <scope>compile</scope> </dependency> <dependency> <groupId>org.apache.tiles</groupId> <artifactId>tiles-template</artifactId> <version>${tiles.version}</version> <scope>compile</s...
5 comments
Read more

CKEDITOR 3.x - Simplest Ajax Submit Plugin

  I have assumed that you have downloaded and got started with CKEDITOR. Step 1 – The html file is shown below: <html> <head> <title>Writer</title> <meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="content-type" /> <script type="text/javascript" src="ckeditor/ckeditor.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/jquery-1.4.2.min.js"></script> <style> .cke_contents { height: 400px !important; } </style> </head> <body> <form action="sample_posteddata.php" method="post"> <textarea id="editor" > </textarea> <script type="text/javascript"> //<![CDATA[ CKEDITOR.replace( 'editor', { fullPage : true, uiColor : '#9AB8F3', toolbar : 'MyToolbar' }); //]]> </script> </form> </body> </html> Note that the jquery js...
3 comments
Read more

Load your Spring beans as plug-ins

There are different ways of loading Spring beans in a web application – viz using the dispatcher servlet or the context loader listener. A more modular and flexible approach (which also allows you to minimize coupling and dependencies in your applications) is to load the barebones of your application with the core context loaders and load the rest of your beans in a pluggable way. For example you may be interested in loading your page controllers, business tier and data access code as three separate modules. Off course you can do this and then use import in a main spring config file or a comma separate list in your web.xml where you configure the spring bean definition xmls. But what if you just wanted to drop in a jar with Spring beans and be sure they will be loaded and registered in the container. This also eases the pain of swapping an implementation. The goal is to put all your Spring beans in a particular layer, package it as a jar with one or more configuration file(with one fol...
3 comments
Read more