Question

I’ve not seen anything in this area I would recommend to a client. If you’ve used Spring PortletMVC, how did you test it?

It’s easy to test under the level of portlet code, and relatively easy to test on the client side through HtmlUnit, Selenium and the like, but I haven’t seen anything that is a “Gray Box” test in the spirit of JSFUnit (which looks to me to be the way forward).

• Apache’s Pluto driver could theoretically be used to bootstrap a test harness. Has anyone tried this?
• Any stub or data provider approaches?
• Any approach to address two-phase processing concerns?

Answer 1

I don’t know anything about portlets but here it goes.

There’s portletUnit.

portletUnit is a testing framework
used to test JSR-168 portlets outside
portlet container just as servletUnit
is used to test servlets outside a
servlet container. The projected is
architected to map the functionally of
servletUnit onto portlets with
servletUnit itself providing the
foundation for portletUnit.

Some more related info could be found on his Project PortletUnit blog, including PortletUnit and Spring Portlet: Checking form validation errors.

When testing with portletUnit, it is
not obvious how to check if there were
any form errors. Fortunately, using
the render listener feature of
PortletRunner, there is a simple way
to check for validator errors.

There’s also a blog article written by Nils-Helge Garli Hegvik in 2007 titled Testing Portlets with Jetty, Pluto and JWebUnit.

Remembering an excellent article from
Johannes Brodwall’s blog about
integration testing with Jetty and
JWebUnit, I wanted to extend his
approach to use the embedded
jetty-pluto setup I have created. This
turned out to be to be quite easy.

Finally, Spring Framework documentation 10.2 Unit testing.

The
org.springframework.mock.web.portlet
package contains a set of Portlet API
mock objects, targeted at usage with
Spring’s Portlet MVC framework.

[…] The org.springframework.test.web
package contains ModelAndViewAssert,
which can be used in combination with
any testing framework (e.g., JUnit 4+,
TestNG, etc.) for unit tests dealing
with Spring MVC ModelAndView objects.

[…] To test your Spring MVC Controllers, use
ModelAndViewAssert combined with
MockHttpServletRequest,
MockHttpSession, etc. from the
org.springframework.mock.web package.

Here’s a related article written by John Ferguson Smart titled
Unit testing your Spring-MVC applications.

One of the great things about this
framework is how testable it is. In
Spring-MVC, any custom validators (for
field and form validation) and
property editors (for converting text
fields to specific Java types) are
dead-easy to test – you can just test
them as if they where isolated POJOs.

Spring-MVC also comes with a full set
of mock objects that you can use (with
a bit of practice) to test your
controllers to your heart’s content.
For example, you can use classes like
MockHttpServletRequest and
MockHttpServletResponse to simulate
your HTTP request and response
objects. This is also made easier by
the fact that Controllers can be
instanciated as normal Java classes.
For example, imagine you are testing a
controller class for a page that
updates a client details record. You
could do this very simply as follows:

public class UpdateClientTest {
        //
        // Prepare your request
        //
        request.setMethod("POST");      
        request.setParameter("id", "100");
        request.setParameter("firstName", "Jane");
        request.setParameter("lastName", "Doe");
        //
        // Invoke the controller
        //
    controller = new ChoosePeriodController();
        ModelAndView mav = controller.handleRequest(request, response);
    //
    // Inject any service objects you need
    //
        controller.setClientService(clientService);
    ...
        //
        // Inspect the results
        //
        assert mav != null;
        assertEquals("displayClient",mav.getViewName());  
        Client client = (Client) mav.getModel().get("client");
        assertEquals("Jane",client.getFirstName());  
        assertEquals("Doe",client.getLastName());  
    ...        
    }
    ...