Integration tests with Maven and JUnit

byRafał Nowak
August 10, 2013
2 minute read

There is no doubt that integration tests phase is crucial in modern applications development. We need to test behaviour of our subsystems and how they interact with other modules. Using JUnit and Maven it’s quite easy to create integration tests and run them in separate phase than unit test. It is very important, because integration tests tend to take much more time than unit ones because they work with database, network connections, other subsystems etc. Therefore, we want to run them more rarely. With JUnit in version >= 4.8 there are two approaches for creating and running integration test:
* using naming conventions and specifying separate executions for maven-surefire plugin
* create marking interface and mark integration tests with @Category annotation and run test from failsafe-plugin (although it is possible to use surefire in both cases)

Separate executions First method needs naming convention like naming all unit tests with “..Test.java” postfix (or “..Spec.groovy” ;) and integration tests with “..IntegrationTest.java”. Then we need to change maven surefire configuration:

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.15</version>
    <configuration>
        <skip>true</skip>    
    </configuration>
</plugin>

What I did here is forcing maven to skip default test phase. Instead of that, I will configure two separate executions (just below the section):

<executions>
    <execution>
        <id>unit-tests</id>
        <phase>test</phase>
        <goals>
            <goal>test</goal>
        </goals>
        <configuration>
            <skip>false</skip>
            <includes>
                <include>**/*Test.class</include>
                <include>**/*Spec.class</include>
            </includes>
            <excludes>
                <exclude>**/*IntegrationTest.class</exclude>
            </excludes>
        </configuration>
    </execution>
    <execution>
        <id>integration-tests</id>
        <phase>integration-test</phase>
        <goals>
            <goal>test</goal>
        </goals>
        <configuration>
            <skip>false</skip>
            <includes>
                <include>**/*IntegrationTest.class</include>
            </includes>
        </configuration>
    </execution>
</executions>

In unit test execution I include all test that match naming convention for unit tests (both JUnit and spock ones) and exclude files matching integration test pattern and in integration test execution I did something opposite ;)

Annotations

Another method requires defining of marking interface like this:

package info.rnowak.webtex.common.test;

public interface IntegrationTest {

}

Then we can mark our integration test class with:

@Category(IntegrationTest.class)

Next thing is changing of surefire plugin configuration to omit integration test:

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.15</version>
    <configuration>
        <includes>
            <include>**/*Test.class</include>
            <include>**/*Spec.class</include>
        </includes>  
        <excludedGroups>info.rnowak.webtex.common.test.IntegrationTest</excludedGroups> 
    </configuration>
</plugin>

What has changed here is new tag with name of interface which marks our integration tests. Next, we need to add and configure maven-failsafe plugin in order to run test from out integration test group:

<plugin><plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-failsafe-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.15</version>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <goals>
                <goal>integration-test</goal>
            </goals>
            <configuration>
                <groups>info.rnowak.webtex.common.test.IntegrationTest</groups>
                <includes>
                    <include>**/*.class</include>
                </includes>
            </configuration>
        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>

With this configuration failsafe will run only test marked with @Category(IntegrationTest.class)annotation, no matter what their names are.

What is better? Well, in my opinion it’s just a matter of taste and style. Annotating each integration class may be a little cumbersome but we are not limited to naming classes within specified convention. On the other hand, unit test and integration test usually are named with some convention, so annotations are not a big deal.

Rafał Nowak

— Previous article

Unable to instantiate default tuplizer

Next article —

Recently at storm-users

How we use Kotlin with Exposed at TouK

byPiotr Jagielski
February 12, 2019

Why Kotlin? At TouK, we try to early adopt technologies. We don’t have a starter project skeleton that is reused in every new project, we want to try something that fits the project needs, even if it’s not that popular yet. We tried Kotlin first it mid 2016, right after reaching 1.0.2 version

DDevelopment & Design

JBoss Envers and Spring transaction managers

byJakub Nabrdalik
September 20, 2011

I've stumbled upon a bug with my configuration for JBoss Envers today, despite having integration tests all over the application. I have to admit, it casted a dark shadow of doubt about the value of all the tests for a moment. I've been practicing TDD since 2005, and frankly speaking, I should have been smarter than that.

My fault was simple. I've started using Envers the right way, with exploratory tests and a prototype. Then I've deleted the prototype and created some integration tests using in-memory H2 that looked more or less like this example:

@Test
public void savingAndUpdatingPersonShouldCreateTwoHistoricalVersions() {
    //given
    Person person = createAndSavePerson();
    String oldFirstName = person.getFirstName();
    String newFirstName = oldFirstName + "NEW";

    //when
    updatePersonWithNewName(person, newFirstName);

    //then
    verifyTwoHistoricalVersionsWereSaved(oldFirstName, newFirstName);
}

private Person createAndSavePerson() {
    Transaction transaction = session.beginTransaction();
    Person person = PersonFactory.createPerson();
    session.save(person);
    transaction.commit();
    return person;
}    

private void updatePersonWithNewName(Person person, String newName) {
    Transaction transaction = session.beginTransaction();
    person.setFirstName(newName);
    session.update(person);
    transaction.commit();
}

private void verifyTwoHistoricalVersionsWereSaved(String oldFirstName, String newFirstName) {
    List<Object[]> personRevisions = getPersonRevisions();
    assertEquals(2, personRevisions.size());
    assertEquals(oldFirstName, ((Person)personRevisions.get(0)[0]).getFirstName());
    assertEquals(newFirstName, ((Person)personRevisions.get(1)[0]).getFirstName());
}

private List<Object[]> getPersonRevisions() {
    Transaction transaction = session.beginTransaction();
    AuditReader auditReader = AuditReaderFactory.get(session);
    List<Object[]> personRevisions = auditReader.createQuery()
            .forRevisionsOfEntity(Person.class, false, true)
            .getResultList();
    transaction.commit();
    return personRevisions;
}

Because Envers inserts audit data when the transaction is commited (in a new temporary session), I thought I have to create and commit the transaction manually. And that is true to some point.

My fault was that I didn't have an end-to-end integration/acceptance test, that would call to entry point of the application (in this case a service which is called by GWT via RPC), because then I'd notice, that the Spring @Transactional annotation, and calling transaction.commit() are two, very different things.

Spring @Transactional annotation will use a transaction manager configured for the application. Envers on the other hand is used by subscribing a listener to hibernate's SessionFactory like this:

<bean id="sessionFactory" class="org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.annotation.AnnotationSessionFactoryBean" >        
...
 <property name="eventListeners">
     <map key-type="java.lang.String" value-type="org.hibernate.event.EventListeners">
         <entry key="post-insert" value-ref="auditEventListener"/>
         <entry key="post-update" value-ref="auditEventListener"/>
         <entry key="post-delete" value-ref="auditEventListener"/>
         <entry key="pre-collection-update" value-ref="auditEventListener"/>
         <entry key="pre-collection-remove" value-ref="auditEventListener"/>
         <entry key="post-collection-recreate" value-ref="auditEventListener"/>
     </map>
 </property>
</bean>

<bean id="auditEventListener" class="org.hibernate.envers.event.AuditEventListener" />

Envers creates and collects something called AuditWorkUnits whenever you update/delete/insert audited entities, but audit tables are not populated until something calls AuditProcess.beforeCompletion, which makes sense. If you are using org.hibernate.transaction.JDBCTransaction manually, this is called on commit() when notifying all subscribed javax.transaction.Synchronization objects (and enver's AuditProcess is one of them).

The problem was, that I used a wrong transaction manager.

<bean id="transactionManager" class="org.springframework.jdbc.datasource.DataSourceTransactionManager" >
    <property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource"/>
</bean>

This transaction manager doesn't know anything about hibernate and doesn't use org.hibernate.transaction.JDBCTransaction. While Synchronization is an interface from javax.transaction package, DataSourceTransactionManager doesn't use it (maybe because of simplicity, I didn't dig deep enough in org.springframework.jdbc.datasource), and thus Envers works fine except not pushing the data to the database.

Which is the whole point of using Envers.

Use right tools for the task, they say. The whole problem is solved by using a transaction manager that is well aware of hibernate underneath.

<bean id="transactionManager" class="org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.HibernateTransactionManager" >
    <property name="sessionFactory" ref="sessionFactory"/>
</bean>

Lesson learned: always make sure your acceptance tests are testing the right thing. If there is a doubt about the value of your tests, you just don't have enough of them,

DDevelopment & Design

Easy configuration usage with ConfigSlurper

byDominik Przybysz
September 20, 2015

What's the problem?We have to deal with properties in almost every projects that we write. Properties class, which we use in these cases, is just mapping key to value. Sometimes it is fine, but in many cases properties look like tree. Example of proper...