Question

I’m trying to test my code, written using JBoss Seam and Hibernate. What I’d like to achieve is this:

Execute a SeamTest automated test to run a particular method on a Seam component. This component performs a database update (merge or save). I’d like to cause this update to fail, allowing me to test my error-handling code and ensuring my code recovers gracefully.

I’ve not been able to determine a simple way of doing this.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Should the update fail because of a (simulated) malfunction in Hibernate or because your entity-validation did not succeed? I claim you hardly run into the former case. I never experienced Hibernate problems that weren’t caused by my code. For such situations, you have to make sure that your transaction is rolled backed if a Hibernate exception occurs. Normally, if you have annotated your action method in Seam with @Transactional your transaction should be rolled back upon a RuntimeException (each HibernateException is a RuntimeException).

For the latter case (testing your entity-validation) you can create a ComponentTest that sends an invalid entity to your update method.

Another situation you could check is what happens if you call your method with a null entity to be updated or with an entity that doesn’t exist on the DB.

If you post the code of your update method, I’ll try to give some more suggestions.