Unit test for J2EE application

Question

I am writting a Unit test for One J2EE application. The Application is built in such a way that makes unit testing extremely difficult.
There are 2 things that contribute to the mess.
1. Sping integration means all the config files are specified in web.xml independently, even though their beans rely on each other across files. End result is in a unit, I cannot try to load a bean because some of its dependencies are missing (ie. they are in a config file that the first file does not include). For this I tried to use AbstractDependencyInjectionSpringContextTests class to set the Spring Application Context when you are not in the flow but didn't success ed.If any one has use this please post the example.
2. The application is using Errors interface of package org.springframework.validation. To write a test for any validator class you have to pass the object of Error in the validate method with the command object. Now my question is how you can set this Error object when you are not in the flow. For this I tried to use Mock object e.g Errors error;
Mockery context = new Mockery();
final Errors errorMock =context.mock(Errors.class);
//call the validate object with mock object
classObject.doValidate(cmdObject, errorMock)
This thing doesn't work. It gives me below error message.
unexpected invocation: errors.pushNestedPath("")
no expectations specified: did you...
- forget to start an expectation with a cardinality clause?
- call a mocked method to specify the parameter of an expectation?
Is there any way to get around these hiccups programmatically in unit tests?
thanks...

Answer 1

If you are doing unit testing, try to use straight JUnit4 without involving the Spring framework. Given that you do unit testing, you might not need Spring configuration in your unit test at all. You can programmatically instantiate the instance of the class under testing and either programmatically instantiate collaborating objects, or create mock objects for that purpose. If you are doing functional testing, you might need a Spring context after all. Understand that your tests are running in the different context than the complete application, so you would have to create separate application context for your test(s). You might have to go through the existing Spring configuration modules that you created for your application and re-jiggle them a bit so that they can be included both in your application context and your unit test context.
Hope this helps.