Question

Given a testng class that uses spring’s test utility annotation ContextConfiguration to create beans, the beans are only created once for the life of the test class.

Before using this, I always used the @BeforeMethod to rebuild everything before each @Test method.

My question: Is there a way to have spring rebuild the beans for each @Test method?

//The beans are unfortunately created only once for the life of the class.
@ContextConfiguration( locations = { "/path/to/my/test/beans.xml"})
public class Foo {

    @BeforeMethod
    public void setUp() throws Exception {
        //I am run for every test in the class
    }

    @AfterMethod
    public void tearDown() throws Exception {
        //I am run for every test in the class
    }

    @Test
    public void testNiceTest1() throws Exception {    }

    @Test
    public void testNiceTest2() throws Exception {    }

}

Answer 1

If you want the context to be reloaded on each test run, then you ought to be extending AbstractTestNGSpringContextTests and using the @DiritesContext annotation in addition to @ContextConfiguration. An example:

@ContextConfiguration(locations = {
        "classpath:yourconfig.xml"
})
@DirtiesContext(classMode = DirtiesContext.ClassMode.AFTER_EACH_TEST_METHOD)
public class YourTestClass extends AbstractTestNGSpringContextTests {
 //magic
}

A classmode of Context.ClassMode.AFTER_EACH_TEST_METHOD will cause spring to reload the context after each test method is called. You can also use DirtiesContext.ClassMode.AFTER_CLASS to reload the context before each test class (useful to be used on an superclass for all spring enabled test classes).