Question

I am trying to write a unit test for the following method in my controller.

@Autowired
    private ApplicationContext context;

    private String getProperty() {
        try {
            Properties props = context.getBean("myProperties", Properties.class);
            String val = props.getProperty("myProperty");
......

The Bean is declared like this in my applicationContext:

<util:properties id="myProperties" scope="prototype" location="file:${catalina.base}/webapps/myProperties.properties"/>

How can I mock this so that I can test different values of the val variable?

I thought about creating a test properties file and mocking it like this:

context = Mockito.mock(ApplicationContext.class);
Mocikto.when(context.getBean("myProperties", Properties.class)).thenReturn(some test file)

but then I would have to declare the test file as a bean somewhere.

I was wondering if there was an easier way to do this?

Thanks

Answer 1

If you’re using spring-3, you can do:

<context:property-placeholder location="myprops.properties" />

And in your code:

@Value("${myProperty}")
private String myProp;

public String getMyProp() {
    return myProp;
}

This causes myprops.properties to be made available for variable substitutions via ${…} expressions, and the @Value annotation allows value injection of properties. Then in your unit test you can simply set different values of myProp.