In previous guide, REST Controller for Books was created. It is a good practice to keep the test cases upto speed with development. Here let’s explore how to unit test REST methods.
Code reference: https://github.com/GlueCoders/springboot-guide/releases/tag/rest-with-mvc
Include following dependency in pom.xml file.
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-test</artifactId>
<version>${spring.version}</version>
</dependency>
This will include libraries for Spring Test, Mockito, Hamcrest and other useful third party libraries required during unit testing.
To test Spring MVC Controllers @WebMvcTest annotation is used. This annotation scans for all MVC related components and will not include regular @Component classes. This is often used to test one controller class at a time and is combined with Mockito framework to mock the dependencies. Spring has @MockBean annotation which plays nice with Mockito library.
@RunWith(SpringRunner.class)
@WebMvcTest(Books.class)
public class BooksTest {
@Autowired
private MockMvc mvc;
@MockBean
private BookService bookService;
@RunWith defines the runner class that is to be used to run test cases, SpringRunner is the defacto choice since Spring is used pretty much for everything in the application.
@WebMvcTest takes the class of controller that is under test. This will start the web application context, embedded servlet container is not used and this keeps testing lightweight.
MockMvc is the helper class which provides syntax to call controller classes as HTTP requests. It also define methods for expectations on HTTP response.
@MockBean creates a Mockito mock of the BookService which is a dependency for Books controller. By having mock we can control the behavior of dependencies without calling the real method and really just focus on unit testing of controller class. To control the behavior of bookService, a Behavior nested class has been defined in this test cases which will be shown later.
Following are the usages of MockMvc instance mvc to perform unit testing on REST methods.
Following test case corresponds to getAllBooks() method in Books controller.
@Test
public void getAllBooks_NoBooks() throws Exception {
Behavior.set(bookService).hasNoBooks();
mvc
.perform(get("/books"))
.andExpect(status().isOk())
.andExpect(content().contentType(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON_UTF8))
.andExpect(content().json("[]"));
verify(bookService, times(1)).getAllBooks();
}
.perform(.. is analogous to making an HTTP request to REST controller.
get("/books") defines that a HTTP GET request has to be made on ‘/books’ path.
.andExpect(.. can be used to set expectations on HTTP response received from controller class such as status().isOk() means that HTTP response code should be 200.
content().json([]) means that response body should match json content that is given in json() method.
content().contentType(... means that Content-Type header should match the value as given in method.
Behavior is a custom class which is setting Mockito methods on bookService.
Following test case corresponds to addBook() method in Books controller.
@Test
public void addBook_Positive() throws Exception {
Behavior.set(bookService).returnSame();
String bookContent = mapper.writeValueAsString(effectiveJavaBook);
mvc
.perform(post("/books")
.content(bookContent)
.contentType(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON_UTF8))
.andExpect(status().isCreated())
.andExpect(content().contentType(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON_UTF8))
.andExpect(content().json(bookContent));
verify(bookService, times(1)).addBook(effectiveJavaBook);
}
post(.. defines to make an HTTP POST request along with content and content-type defined in methods.
mapper here is the instance of Jackson ObjectMapper which allows for serialization and deserialization of POJOs to and from JSON.
Following test case corresponds to deleteBook() method in Books controller.
@Test
public void deleteBook() throws Exception {
mvc
.perform(delete("/books/1234567899"))
.andExpect(status().isOk());
verify(bookService, times(1)).deleteBook(anyLong());
}
delete("/books...") defines to make an HTTP DELETE request.
Let’s also explore some of the Mockito methods that are being used in this class.
verify method is used to verify the number of times a mock method has been called. This is especially useful to test conditional statements, since if test case does not expect that code flow to enter a certain condition statement then the methods inside that block should not be called even once.
It’s signature is verify(T mock, VerificationMode mode) where T corresponds to mocked bean and mode refers to number of times methods should be called. It can also be used to match the parameters received by mock method as shown below
verify(bookService, times(1)).getBookByISBN(effectiveJavaBook.getIsbnCode());
This means that method getBookByISBN of bean bookService should be called only once during execution of test case. Also the parameter received by the method is verified by giving the exact argument as here effectiveJavaBook.getIsbnCode().
These constructs are used to set expectations on mocked beans. Let’s see an example first :
when(bookService.getBookByISBN(book.getIsbnCode())).thenReturn(book);
when(bookService.addBook(book)).thenReturn(book);
when(bookService.getAllBooks()).thenReturn(Collections.emptyList());
when(bookService.addBook(any())).thenAnswer(invocationOnMock -> invocationOnMock.getArguments()[0]);
First example defines that if getBookByISBN is invoked with some isbnCode then it should return the same book, since the isbnCode is also fetched from the same instance of book.
Second example defines that addBook should return the book instance if it is called with the same book instance.
Third example defines that getAllBooks should return emptyList if it is invoked.
Fourth example defines that addBook should return the same instance that it receives as parameter. Note here there is no predefined book instance so this will work for any argument passed to addBook, however in second example it will only work for that instance of book which has been used in when(.. clause.
The whole class BooksTest can be referred in src/tests/java directory under org.gluecoders.library.rest package.