DDevelopment & Design

Testing ServiceMix 4.3 services with PaxExam

  • bympr
  • March 31, 2011
  • 4 minute read

In the project that I’m currently working on we are developing a set of extensions for ServiceMix – more or less some monitoring stuff. It’s pretty simple using SMX ExchangeListeners – you implement the interface, register it via Spring DM and voila – you have everything you need. But how are you going to test it? Of course, we write unit tests, and functional tests, but all of them are leaving NMR/OSGi stuff behind – you just don’t include osgi-beans.xml’s. This leaves us with untested code – my baaaaad ;) Fortunately, here comes a rescue – it’s PaxExam. It’s a framework for testing OSGi services in various containers – most notably felix & equinox. But making it play nicely with latest & greates ServiceMix 4.3 was not so easy – so I what to share it. I made a sample project, it’s on my 

github It consists of 2 modules: first contains service & listener under test, and the second one contains The Test. I won’t go into details about the service bundle – it’s just cxf-bc endpoint passing invocations to camel router, which sets output message. The listener is also very simple. The point is that we have 2 of most widely used smx components, with OSGi packaging and OSGi-config configuration. This leaves us with itests module. It’s core is BaseIntegrationTest, which contains Pax Exam configuration and some utility methods. Pax Exam configuration was the most difficult part for me. The reason is that servicemix consists of many, many dependant projects, each of them having own release cycle, and Pax Exam has it’s own. Anyway, here is what works for me (note – it’ll work with sun jdk 1.6 only I think). JUnit test (which is of course no unit test btw) using Pax Exam has to have static configuration method, which tells testing framework how to prepare container – which one, which parameters, which bundles to install. It looks like this: So, what should go into configuration method? First, we have to set up system packages. We have to exclude StAX API and some SOAP APIs from system packages: The system property “org.ops4j.pax.runner.platform.ee” tells PaxRunner where to look for system packages. I copied them from SMX distro – except that I had to add two Sun packages containing Schema and JAXP implementations – otherwise XPath & schema failed to work. Still, to make SchemaFactory work I had to manually add system property specifying implementation class. Next thing is rather standard PaxExam configuration: OSGi container, logging profile, spring and spring DM setup (note – you have to use 1.2 version, not the latest one): Two notes here. A profile is a set of bundles predefined to be used in PaxExam. Also note that we don’t use System.setProperty, but PaxExam DSL expression. The reason is that the OSGi container is run separately, so we have to distinguish system properties used to start it, and properties that will be accessible to bundles inside it. Then comes felix install configuration. I wanted to mimic SMX configuration conventions (files in etc dir, ended with .cfg), so I copied felixInstall configuration and add appropriate system properties. Note, that we set start level to 2. In Karaf deafatul start level is 60, in PaxRunner – it’s 5. But I decided to stay with Pax way – don’t have that many bundles to need so fine grained configuration. Now, karaf configuration. It’s also pretty standard, just remember that we need Aries bluepring in version 0.2-incubation, and not 0.1 (as PaxExam has it) or latest 0.3 Now, time for Servicemix components configuration. We’ll use nice PaxExam feature – feature scan. This means that we can specify Karaf features package, and PaxExam will install appropriate bundles. So, we choose servicemix features, specify servicemix-camel, camel-nmr and servicemix-cxf-bc, and …? And it turns out that servicemix-cxf-bc has unresolved dependencies :/ The reason is that it was (at least it seems so ;)) tested with full distro, which contains also activemq-blueprint feature. Since we don’t want activemq for our test setup, we’ll install required bundles manually: Now, everything is ready for the final step – installation of services bundle: mavenBundle(“pl.touk.smx4”, “paxExamSample-service”) To make testing easier I also created few util methods. Two interesting ones are: getBean and sendMessage. getBean uses ServiceTracker to get Spring/Blueprint bean registered as a OSGi service. Note, that it is done asynchronously – that’s why we need Thread.sleep for ServiceTracker. sendMessage wraps interaction with NMR – it creates inOut exchange, populates it and send synchronously via channel. Well… this setup is not particularly easy, but once we get through it, the tests look quite nice: This sends test message down the NMR, check that output is ok, and that it was caught by Listener. What’s left to do? You can see some nasty explicit dependencies in configuration – should be taken from maven. Next goal would also be to run SOAPUI tests for testing end to end interaction. But let’s leave it for next entry. To sum up: I think PaxExam is a great tool, although the setup is not so easy. Tests setup is quite long – actually it’s faster to build the service bundle and run update on Servicemix to see changes. That’s why I would rather recommend using PaxExam for regression tests, run on Hudson (whooops, Jenkins ;))

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DDevelopment & Design

Using WsLite in practice

TL;DR

There is a example working GitHub project which covers unit testing and request/response logging when using WsLite.

Why Groovy WsLite ?

I’m a huge fan of Groovy WsLite project for calling SOAP web services. Yes, in a real world you have to deal with those - big companies have huge amount of “legacy” code and are crazy about homogeneous architecture - only SOAP, Java, Oracle, AIX…

But I also never been comfortable with XFire/CXF approach of web service client code generation. I wrote a bit about other posibilites in this post. With JAXB you can also experience some freaky classloading errors - as Tomek described on his blog. In a large commercial project the “the less code the better” principle is significant. And the code generated from XSD could look kinda ugly - especially more complicated structures like sequences, choices, anys etc.

Using WsLite with native Groovy concepts like XmlSlurper could be a great choice. But since it’s a dynamic approach you have to be really careful - write good unit tests and log requests. Below are my few hints for using WsLite in practice.

Unit testing

Suppose you have some invocation of WsLite SOAPClient (original WsLite example):

def getMothersDay(long _year) {
    def response = client.send(SOAPAction: action) {
       body {
           GetMothersDay('xmlns':'http://www.27seconds.com/Holidays/US/Dates/') {
              year(_year)
           }
       }
    }
    response.GetMothersDayResponse.GetMothersDayResult.text()
}

How can the unit test like? My suggestion is to mock SOAPClient and write a simple helper to test that builded XML is correct. Example using great SpockFramework: 

void setup() {
   client = Mock(SOAPClient)
   service.client = client
}

def "should pass year to GetMothersDay and return date"() {
  given:
      def year = 2013
  when:
      def date = service.getMothersDay(year)
  then:
      1 * client.send(_, _) >> { Map params, Closure requestBuilder ->
            Document doc = buildAndParseXml(requestBuilder)
            assertXpathEvaluatesTo("$year", '//ns:GetMothersDay/ns:year', doc)
            return mockResponse(Responses.mothersDay)
      }
      date == "2013-05-12T00:00:00"
}

This uses a real cool feature of Spock - even when you mock the invocation with “any mark” (_), you are able to get actual arguments. So we can build XML that would be passed to SOAPClient's send method and check that specific XPaths are correct:

void setup() {
    engine = XMLUnit.newXpathEngine()
    engine.setNamespaceContext(new SimpleNamespaceContext(namespaces()))
}

protected Document buildAndParseXml(Closure xmlBuilder) {
    def writer = new StringWriter()
    def builder = new MarkupBuilder(writer)
    builder.xml(xmlBuilder)
    return XMLUnit.buildControlDocument(writer.toString())
}

protected void assertXpathEvaluatesTo(String expectedValue,
                                      String xpathExpression, Document doc) throws XpathException {
    Assert.assertEquals(expectedValue,
            engine.evaluate(xpathExpression, doc))
}

protected Map namespaces() {
    return [ns: 'http://www.27seconds.com/Holidays/US/Dates/']
}

The XMLUnit library is used just for XpathEngine, but it is much more powerful for comparing XML documents. The NamespaceContext is needed to use correct prefixes (e.g. ns:GetMothersDay) in your Xpath expressions.

Finally - the mock returns SOAPResponse instance filled with envelope parsed from some constant XML:

protected SOAPResponse mockResponse(String resp) {
    def envelope = new XmlSlurper().parseText(resp)
    new SOAPResponse(envelope: envelope)
}

Request and response logging

The WsLite itself doesn’t use any logging framework. We usually handle it by adding own sendWithLogging method:

private SOAPResponse sendWithLogging(String action, Closure cl) {
    SOAPResponse response = client.send(SOAPAction: action, cl)
    log(response?.httpRequest, response?.httpResponse)
    return response
}

private void log(HTTPRequest request, HTTPResponse response) {
    log.debug("HTTPRequest $request with content:\n${request?.contentAsString}")
    log.debug("HTTPResponse $response with content:\n${response?.contentAsString}")
}

This logs the actual request and response send through SOAPClient. But it logs only when invocation is successful and errors are much more interesting… So here goes withExceptionHandler method:

private SOAPResponse withExceptionHandler(Closure cl) {
    try {
        cl.call()
    } catch (SOAPFaultException soapEx) {
        log(soapEx.httpRequest, soapEx.httpResponse)
        def message = soapEx.hasFault() ? soapEx.fault.text() : soapEx.message
        throw new InfrastructureException(message)
    } catch (HTTPClientException httpEx) {
        log(httpEx.request, httpEx.response)
        throw new InfrastructureException(httpEx.message)
    }
}
def send(String action, Closure cl) {
    withExceptionHandler {
        sendWithLogging(action, cl)
    }
}

XmlSlurper gotchas

Working with XML document with XmlSlurper is generally great fun, but is some cases could introduce some problems. A trivial example is parsing an id with a number to Long value:

def id = Long.valueOf(edit.'@id' as String)

The Attribute class (which edit.'@id' evaluates to) can be converted to String using as operator, but converting to Long requires using valueOf.

The second example is a bit more complicated. Consider following XML fragment:

<edit id="3">
   <params>
      <param value="label1" name="label"/>
      <param value="2" name="param2"/>
   </params>
   <value>123</value>
</edit>
<edit id="6">
   <params>
      <param value="label2" name="label"/>
      <param value="2" name="param2"/>
   </params>
   <value>456</value>
</edit>

We want to find id of edit whose label is label1. The simplest solution seems to be:

def param = doc.edit.params.param.find { it['@value'] == 'label1' }
def edit = params.parent().parent()

But it doesn’t work! The parent method returns multiple edits, not only the one that is parent of given param…

Here’s the correct solution:

doc.edit.find { edit ->
    edit.params.param.find { it['@value'] == 'label1' }
}

Example

The example working project covering those hints could be found on GitHub.

DDevelopment & Design

Journal.IO 1.3 released

AboutJust a moment ago (in February 17th) Journal.IO 1.3 has been released. Journal.IO (https://github.com/sbtourist/Journal.IO) is a lightweight, zero-dependency journal storage implementation written in Java. We use it in our project for storing appl...AboutJust a moment ago (in February 17th) Journal.IO 1.3 has been released. Journal.IO (https://github.com/sbtourist/Journal.IO) is a lightweight, zero-dependency journal storage implementation written in Java. We use it in our project for storing appl...