Question

I need to write a jUnit test for a rather complex application which runs in a Tomcat.

I wrote a class which builds up my Spring context.

private static ApplicationContext
springContext = null;

springContext = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext(
                     new String[] {"beans"....});

In the application there is a call:

public class myClass implements ServletContextAware { 

.... final String folder = **servletContext.getRealPath**("/example"); ...
}

which breaks everything, because the ServletContext is null.

I have started to build a mock object:

static ServletConfig servletConfigMock = createMock(ServletConfig.class);
static ServletContext servletContextMock = createMock(ServletContext.class);

    @BeforeClass
    public static void setUpBeforeClass() throws Exception {
        expect(servletConfigMock.getServletContext())
                 .andReturn(servletContextMock).anyTimes();

        expect(servletContextMock.getRealPath("/example"))
                 .andReturn("...fulllpath").anyTimes();
        replay(servletConfigMock);
        replay(servletContextMock);
    }

Is there a simple method to inject the ServletContext or to start the Tomcat with a deployment descriptor at the runtime of the jUnit test?

I am using: Spring, Maven, Tomcat 6 and EasyMock for the mock objects.

Answer 1

What you actually want is to test the web-layer.
There are a couple of ways to do it:

• use MockServletContext provided by spring. This is the best way – check the linked documentation for how to do it.
• use ServletUnit from HtmlUnit
• use the cactus framework
• use selenium to test the web layer functionally
• make a runtime mock as you did

And whenever you want to inject something in a test, use ReflectionTestUtils

The complication comes from the fact that the web-layer is not quite suitable for unit-testing. It is more a subject of functional testing.

If there are methods that seem suitable for unit-testing, they perhaps belong to the service layer. And they should not have a dependency on the ServletContext