Unit testing a Stripes ActionBean wired with Spring Beans

Last friday I spent quite some time to figure out how to initialize my Spring beans when unit-testing some Stripes ActionBeans. There wasn’t any Spring context at all and you really need that for integration testing.

How to set up a unit test with Stripes is explained pretty good here.
I applied approach 2, run the tests within a mock container.
My unit test is extending AbstractTransactionalJUnit4SpringContextTests and is annotated with @RunWith(SpringJUnit4ClassRunner.class) and @ContextConfiguration(locations = { … })
The code I’m about to show should be put after initialzing the MockServletContext. I recommend using a method annotated with @Before where you do the initialization (I called mine setUpMockServletContext)
Since the unit tests run before the Spring config files are put in the WEB-INF directory, you have to tell Stripes where to find the configuration files:

context.addInitParameter("contextConfigLocation",
"classpath:dataSourceContext.xml\nclasspath:daoContext.xml\nclasspath:applicationContext.xml");

Stripes isn’t smart enough (yet?) to read the @ContextConfiguration annotation, but this file will probably included somewhere in a parent-unit test, so it isn’t a big deal.
The final step is telling Spring to initialize its context with your MockServletContext (note that this is a Stripes MockServletContext, not the one used by Spring!):

ContextLoaderListener springContextLoader = new ContextLoaderListener();
springContextLoader.contextInitialized(new ServletContextEvent(context));

That’s all there is to it. Let’s hope google picks up this blog and other people can handle this tiny problem quicker than I did.

Sources

• Unit testing with Spring
• Unit testing Stripes
• Using Spring with Stripes
• Stripes mailing list