How to test Spring session scoped beans

I wanted to use the http session just as a repository (database/files), to keep facebook access token for currently logged user. While I can manipulate session directly, another option is to declare the class as a session scoped bean in Spring. Somet…

I wanted to use the http session just as a repository (database/files), to keep facebook access token for currently logged user. While I can manipulate session directly, another option is to declare the class as a session scoped bean in Spring. Something like this:

public class RepositoryOnHttpSession {
    private String facebookAccessToken;

    public FacebookTemplate getFacebookTemplate() {
        return new FacebookTemplate(facebookAccessToken);
    }

    public void setFacebookAccessToken(String facebookAccessToken) {
        this.facebookAccessToken = facebookAccessToken;
    }    
}
<bean id="repositoryOnHttpSession" class="pl.touk.storytelling.infrastructure.repositories.RepositoryOnHttpSession" scope="session">
    <aop:scoped-proxy/>
</bean>

<aop:scoped-proxy/> makes Spring IoC container create a cglib proxy, and inject that to other singleton type beans instead. All nice and cool, except integration tests (which get Spring IoC container to inject all the dependencies) are blowing up with:

java.lang.IllegalStateException: No Scope registered for scope ‘session’

While there’s a lot of solutions to be googled (including redeclaring the object as a prototype/sinlgeton for test context, injecting mock http session and request), the easiest way to have a simple thread-bound session scope is just to declare it in the TEST IoC configuration, like below. Just keep in mind that junit fires all tests in a single thread by default, so the state is persisted between tests. You may need to clean it up in @After.

<bean class="org.springframework.beans.factory.config.CustomScopeConfigurer">
    <property name="scopes">
        <map>
            <entry key="session">
                <bean class="org.springframework.context.support.SimpleThreadScope"/>
            </entry>
        </map>
    </property>
</bean>
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Grails with Spock unit test + IntelliJ IDEA = No thread-bound request found

During my work with Grails project using Spock test in IntelliJ IDEA I've encountered this error:

java.lang.IllegalStateException: No thread-bound request found: Are you referring to request attributes outside of an actual web request, or processing a request outside of the originally receiving thread? If you are actually operating within a web request and still receive this message, your code is probably running outside of DispatcherServlet/DispatcherPortlet: In this case, use RequestContextListener or RequestContextFilter to expose the current request.
at org.springframework.web.context.request.RequestContextHolder.currentRequestAttributes(RequestContextHolder.java:131)
at org.codehaus.groovy.grails.plugins.web.api.CommonWebApi.currentRequestAttributes(CommonWebApi.java:205)
at org.codehaus.groovy.grails.plugins.web.api.CommonWebApi.getParams(CommonWebApi.java:65)
... // and few more lines of stacktrace ;)

It occurred when I tried to debug one of test from IDEA level. What is interesting, this error does not happen when I'm running all test using grails test-app for instance.

So what was the issue? With little of reading and tip from Tomek Kalkosiński (http://refaktor.blogspot.com/) it turned out that our test was missing @TestFor annotation and adding it solved all problems.

This annotation, according to Grails docs (link), indicates Spock what class is being tested and implicitly creates field with given type in test class. It is somehow strange as problematic test had explicitly and "manually" created field with proper controller type. Maybe there is a problem with mocking servlet requests?