ALTERthought Blogs

2 April 2006

Better jUnit-ing

jUnit has been around for a long time. But there are always better techniques to implement old ways. I have provided below an efficient junit aprroach integrated with DbUnit and Spring with support for transaction and hibernate open session. Significant features are:

Integration with DbUnit: DbUnit puts database into a known state between test runs. Pre-loads database with known data set before the test
Transaction support using spring: After each test all changes made by the test are rolled back. Hence there is no need to programatically undo channges made by the test. Much cleaner code. (Thanks, Jim)
After each test, clear the pre-loaded data set from database
Support for open session in view: Web applications using Hibernate with lazy loading need to keep the session open till the view is rendered. (Read more)

/**
* Junit test integrated with DbUnit and spring. Provides support for
* transaction and open session. This wraps each test method with a
* transaction and rollbacks after the method exits. DbUnit
* is used to load up the table with initial set of values.
*/

public class MyTest extends AbstractTransactionalDataSourceSpringContextTests {

private SessionFactory sessionFactory;
private Session session;
private static ConfigurableApplicationContext factory;
private final String[] TABLES = { "EmployeeTable", "DepartmentTable" };
private final String DATA_FILE = "data.xml";
private final String[] CONFIG_LOCATIONS = { "spring-context.xml" };

public static Test suite() {
return new TestSuite(MyTest.class);
}

protected String[] getConfigLocations() {
return CONFIG_LOCATIONS;
}

// This method is used to perform any setup operations, such as
// populating a database table, within the transaction.
protected void onSetUpInTransaction() throws Exception {
super.onSetUpInTransaction();
if (factory == null) {
factory = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext(getConfigLocations());
}
// Load test data using DBUnit
DataSource ds = (DataSource) factory.getBean("dataSource");
Connection con = DataSourceUtils.getConnection(ds);
IDatabaseConnection dbUnitCon = new DatabaseConnection(con);
IDataSet dataSet = new FlatXmlDataSet(Thread.currentThread().
getContextClassLoader().getResourceAsStream(DATA_FILE));
try {
DatabaseOperation.CLEAN_INSERT.execute(dbUnitCon, dataSet);
} finally {
DataSourceUtils.releaseConnection(con, ds);
}
// Support of open session
sessionFactory = (SessionFactory) factory.getBean("sessionFactory");
session = sessionFactory.openSession();
TransactionSynchronizationManager.bindResource(sessionFactory, new SessionHolder(session));
}

protected void onTearDownAfterTransaction() throws Exception {
// delete table entries
deleteFromTables(TABLES);
// release session
SessionHolder holder = (SessionHolder) TransactionSynchronizationManager.getResource(sessionFactory);
session = holder.getSession();
TransactionSynchronizationManager.unbindResource(sessionFactory);
SessionFactoryUtils.releaseSession(session, sessionFactory);
}

public void testSomething() throws Exception {
// ...
}

}

Technorati Tags: junit, spring, dbunit, transaction

del.icio.us

4 Comments currently posted.

k says:

There is a better way to test: TestNG (http://testng.org)

Manohar says:

TestNG certainly offers some cool features. jUnit 4 has few improvements over its previous version and closes the gap a little bit. jTiger is also a good alternative.