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Unit Testing Spring Bean Service With Mockito

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The main idea of unit testing is quick compile-time checking that your code (somewhat) fulfills the business requirement.

A good unit testing practice is to not depend on any external system / dependencies. One way to substitute this external dependency is by using mocking tehcniques. Here I’ll go through unit testing a Spring bean service using .

Assuming you have a BankingService class that comes with a method to transfer money from one account to another. The method finds the Account object by its id using AccountsDAO repository class:


public class BankingService {

   private AccountsDAO accountsDAO;
  
  public void transfer(long fromAccountId, long toAccountId, double amount) throws Exception {
    Account fromAccount = accountsDAO.findById(fromAccountId);
    Account toAccount = accountsDAO.findById(toAccountId);
    
    fromAccount.setBalance(fromAccount.getBalance() - amount);
    toAccount.setBalance(toAccount.getBalance() + amount);
  }
}

AccountsDAO obtain the information from a persistent data store (most likely database), hence it is an external dependency. Here’s how to unit test this class:

  1. Ensure junit, spring-test and mockito dependencies are on the classpath 
    
  junit
  junit
  4.7
  test


  org.springframework
  spring-test
  3.2.3.RELEASE
  test


  org.mockito
  mockito-core
  1.9.5
  test

  2. Setup BankingServiceTest.xml spring beans configuration file specific for our unit test. Note in here we created a mock AccountsDAO using Mockito. The order of mock creation here is important, if you place it at the bottom you will get autowiring error. I think this is because Spring couldn’t pre-determine the resulting type of the Mock object (it only looks as if it’s a org.mockito.Mockito bean type).

  3. Setup the unit test class. Notice the BankingService to test and the mock AccountsDAO are autowired into the unit test class 
    (SpringJUnit4ClassRunner.class)
ation("/BankingServiceTest.xml")
public class BankingServiceTest {

   private BankingService bankingService;
   private AccountsDAO mockAccountsDAO;
  
  
  public void testTransfer() throws Exception {
    // Setup 2 accounts
    Account acc1 = new Account();
    acc1.setBalance(800.00);
    Account acc2 = new Account();
    acc2.setBalance(200.00);
    
    // Tell mock DAO to return above accounts when 1011 or 2041 is queried respectively
    when(mockAccountsDAO.findById(1011)).thenReturn(acc1);
    when(mockAccountsDAO.findById(2041)).thenReturn(acc2);
    
    // Invoke the method to test
    bankingService.transfer(1011, 2041, 500.00);
    
    // Verify the money has been transferred
    assertEquals(300.00, acc1.getBalance(), 0.001);
    assertEquals(700.00, acc2.getBalance(), 0.001);
  }
}

  4. The when(..).thenReturn(..) syntax is where the magic happen. It will cause the mock object to return the Account we setup (as opposed of calling SQL to fetch it from database).

There are heaps more magic stuff you can do with Mockito. Checkout .

Source Code

Source code of this demo can be downloaded via git:

git clone https:///gerrytan/mycoolbank.git

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