I am using Selenium GUI tests in a Java Web Application.
Since these tests are actually client, how can we rollback database after running a test?
What you're after is called Fixture Teardown Patterns. Since you need to keep track of all resources that are created in a test and automatically destroy/free them during Teardown. I obviously don't know your framework, but for this case
rollback database after running a test
a good candidate is the Inline Teardown. It includes teardown logic at the end of the Test Method immediately after the result verification. Like so:
My guess is that you can't 'roll back' the database since web applications typically commit transactions between requests.
You'll need to implement your own custom rollback. Perhaps you could create a new user for each test and remove any changes made by this user after the test. Or maybe you want to implement the command pattern.
You might also find a cascading delete helpful
Lately I attended a talk about docker. The speaker was creating a docker container with a mysql database for demonstration purposes. I was immediately thinking about how to use this for integration testing as you can create a clean database instance with very little effort.
I was searching if there are already some best practices and found those to websites
TestContainers - pay attention to the Temporary database containers link
Tutorial – Docker, JPA and Testing - a complete example
I´m in the phase of evaluating on how to integrate this but I´m confident this is what I (and hopefully you) was looking for.
Workflow would be:
Test execution
Start docker container from image with empty
Fill database with master data (if necessary)
Run test
Throw docker container away
Thank you for your suggestions.
I decided to use mysqldump for this purpose. Within Ant, Backup and restore the test-database before and after each batch-test.
Related
I am wondering what people have found their best practice to be for testing Hibernate mappings and queries ?
This cannot be done with Unit Testing, so my experience has been to write Integration Tests that solely tests the DAO layer downwards. This way I can fully test each Insert / Update / Delete / ReadQueries without testing the full end-to-end solution.
Whenever the Integration test suite is run it will:-
Drop and re-create the database.
Run an import SQL script that contains a subset of data.
Run each test in a Transactional context that rolls back the transaction. Therefore it can be run multiple times as an independent test, or and as part of a suite, and the same result is returned as the database is always in a known state.
I never test against a different "in memory" database, as there is always an equivalent development database to test against.
I have never had the need to use DBUnit.
Never use DbUnit for this. It's way too much overhead for this level of testing.
Especially if you're using Spring in your app, check out the Spring Test Framework to help manage your data-access tests, particularly the transaction management features.
An "equivalent development database" is fine, but an in-memory H2 database will blow away anything else for speed. That's important because, while the unit/integration status of these tests may be contested, they're tests you want to run a lot, so they need to be as fast as possible.
So my DAO tests look like this:
Spring manages the SessionFactory and TransactionManager.
Spring handles all transactions for test methods.
Hibernate creates the current schema in an in-memory H2 database.
Test all the save, load, delete, and find methods, doing field-for-field comparison on before and after objects. (E.g. create object foo1, save it, load it as foo2, verify foo1 and foo2 contain identical values.)
Very lightweight and useful for quick feedback.
If you don't depend on proprietary rdbms features (triggers, stored procedures etc) then you can easily and fully test your DAOs using JUnit and an in memory database like HSQLDB. You'll need some rudimentary hibernate.cfg.xml emulation via a class (to initialize hibernate with HSQLDB, load the hbm.xml files you want) and then pass the provided datasource to your daos.
Works well and provides real value to the development lifecycle.
The way I do it is pretty similar with your own, with the exception of actually using in-memory data-bases, like HSQLDB. It's faster and more portable than having a real database configured (one that runs in a standalone server). It's true that for certain more advanced features HSQLDB won't work as it simply does not support them, but I've noticed that I hardly run into those when just integration testing my data access layer. However if this is the case, I like to use the "jar" version of mysql, which allows me to start a fully functional MYSql server from java, and shut it down when I'm done. This is not very practical as the jar file is quite big :
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/connector-mxj-configuration-java-object.html
but it's still useful in some instances.
At work we are trying to simplify an application that was coded with an overkill use of Spring Remoting. This is how it works today:
(Controllers) Spring MVC -> Spring Remoting -> Hibernate
Everything is deployed in a single machine, Spring Remoting is not needed (never will be needed) and adds complexity to code maintenance. We want it out.
How to ensure everything works after our changes? Today we have 0% code coverage! We thought on creating integration tests to our controllers so when we remove Spring Remoting they should behave exactly the same. We thought on using a mix of Spring Test framework in conjunction with DBUnit to bring up Oracle up to a known state every test cycle.
Has anyone tried a similar solution? What are the drawbacks? Would you suggest any better alternative?
It always depends on the ratio effort / benefit that you are willing to take. You can get an almost 100% code coverage if you are really diligent and thorough. But that might be overkill too, especially when it comes to maintaining those tests. But your idea is good. I've done this a couple of times before with medium applications. This is what you should do:
Be sure that you have a well known test data set in the database at the beginning of every test in the test suite (you mentioned that yourself)
Since you're using Hibernate, you might also try using HSQLDB as a substitute for Oracle. That way, your tests will run a lot faster.
Create lots of independent little test cases covering most of your most valued functionality. You can always allow yourself to have some minor bugs in some remote and unimportant corners of the application.
Make sure those test cases all run before the refactoring.
Make sure you have a reference system that will not be touched by the refactoring, in order to be able to add new test cases, in case you think of something only later
Start refactoring, and while refactoring run all relevant tests that could be broken by the current refactoring step. Run the complete test suite once a night using tools such as jenkins.
That should work. If your application is a web application, then I can only recommend selenium. It has a nice jenkins integration and you can create hundreds of test cases by just clicking through your application in the browser (those clicks are recorded and a Java/Groovy/other language test script is generated).
In our Spring MVC / Hibernate (using v3.4) web app we use an Oracle database for integration testing.
To ensure that our database is in a known state each time the test suites are run, we set the following property in our test suite's persistence.xml:
<property name="hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto" value="create"/>
This ensures that the db schema is created each time our tests are run based on the Hibernate annotations in our classes. To populate our database with a know data set, we added a file named import.sql to our classpath with the appropriate SQL inserts. If you have the above property set, Hibernate will run the statements in import.sql on your database after creating the schema.
I want to create a test suit for my java web application. Its a JSP applications with JDBC connectivity . My requirements are as follows,
1 - I should be able to test my database logic (Queries etc) through my models.
2 - Its great if i could test my .jsp pages as well (if possible)
After doing some research I found that DBUnit is good for database backend system testing, but unfortunately i couldnt find any good resource as a starter
What are you all think about testing options I have and it would be great if you could post some links to resources/ examples as well
EDIT:
and I have come across with mock objects (like JMock..), wonder I could use it as a replacement for DBUnit ?
thanks in advance
cheers
sameera
It's not clear from your question if you want to run Integration tests (Front end + back end) or Unit Tests against you Database layer.
If you need a tool that allows you to write Integration tests, you should definitively look at Selenium.
With Selenium you can generate functional tests by simply navigating your web site (JSP pages) and asserting that stuff on the page exists or it's equal to some values.
Selenium comes with a Firefox plugin that will basically generate the code for you. You can replay the test in the browser or export them as Java code and make them part of your test suite. Selenium is an invaluable tool.
The drawback of using a tool like Selenium is that your application need to be deployed somewhere before you can run your test suite. This may be a limitation if you plan to run automated tests generated using Selenium.
If you are only interested in testing your database access code (DAO, Data Access Layer) DBUnit is the perfect tool.
Generally, DBUnit is used to initialize the database tables before testing and, less often, to run assertions on the database content. DBUnit uses an XML based format to represent the data that will be inserted into the database.
The XML files containing the data to pre-populate the db are normally triggered by a build script (Ant, Maven, etc.) or directly in your unit test code.
I have used both approaches, it really depends on how your code is structured and how you access the database (Hibernate, Spring+Hibernate, JDBC...).
If your database is not too big, I'd recommend you populate it just before running your test suite. Alternatively, you can populate only the tables that you are interested in testing prior to every test.
Here is a link to Unitils, that is an additional library that can be used on top of DBUnit to simplify the database testing strategy. I think it can be used as a reference to get you started:
http://www.unitils.org/tutorial.html#Database_testing
Here is anoter link (quite old, 2004) showing the basic mechanics of DBUnit:
http://onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2004/01/21/dbunit.html
DBUnit's official getting-started article here worked for me. Re: database logic testing, you might also want to check this out.
As for JSP testing, I have used Cactus to test my servlets before with success. However, I'm don't know about its JSP-testing facilities.
For your 1st question have a look at this StackOverFlow thread...
For 2nd, I would go with Chry's suggestion of Cactus or Selenium.
Hope that helps.
Background:
I have a Flex web app that communicates with a Java back-end via BlazeDS. The Flex client is composed of a flex-client module, which holds the views and presentation models and a separate flex-service module which holds the models (value objects) and service objects.
I am in the process of writing asynchronous integration tests for the flex-service module's RemoteObjects using FlexUnit4. In some of the tests, I modify the test data and query it back to see if everything works (a technique shown here: http://saturnboy.com/2010/02/async-testing-with-flexunit4)
Question:
How do I go about resetting the database to a known state before each FlexUnit4 test method (or test method chain)? In my Java server integration tests, I did this via a combination of DBUnit and Spring Test's transactions -- which rollback after each test method. But these Flexunit integration span multiple requests and thus multiple transactions.
Short of implementing an integration testing service API on the backend, how can this be accomplished. Surely others have run into this as well? Similar questions have been asked before ( Rollback database after integration (Selenium) tests ), but with no satisfactory answers.
There are several options:
If you use sequences for primary keys: After the database has been loaded with the test data, delete the sequence generator and replace it with one that starts with -1 and counts down. After the test, you can delete objects with a primary key < 0. Breaks for tests which modify existing data.
A similar approach is to create a special user or, if you have created timestamp columns, then the initial data must be before some date in the past. That needs additional indexes, though.
Use a database on the server which can be quickly wiped (H2, for example). Add a service API which you can call from the client to reset the DB.
Add undo to your web app. That's quite an effort but a very cool feature.
Use a database which allows to move back in time with a single command, like Lotus Notes.
Don't use a database at all. Instead write a proxy server which will respond to the correct input with the correct output. Add some code to your real server to write the data exchanged into a file and create your tests from that.
Or write test cases which run against the real server and which create these files. That will allow you to track which files change when you modify code on the server or client.
On the server, write tests which make sure that it will do the correct DB modifications.
Similar to "no database at all", hide all code which accesses the DB in a DB layer and use interfaces to access it. This allows you to write a mock-up layer which behaves like the real database but which saves the data in memory. Sounds simple but is usually a whole lot of work.
Depending on the size of your test database, you could automate clean backups/restores that gives you the exact environment you had on each test run.
I've that approach in on of my current projects (different platform) and we also test data schema change scripts with the same approach.
I'm dehydrated (my fav excuse for short-comings). So sorry if this answer is too close to the "integration testing service API on the backend" response that you didn't want.
The team that set-up flexUnit 'ages ago' made choices and created solutions based on our architecture, some of which would only apply to our infrastructure. Things to consider:
1) all of our backend methods return the same remotely-mapped class. 2) most all of our methods have an abstracted method that telling the method to (or not to) run a "begin transaction" at the beginning of the method and a "commit transaction" at the end (not sure of your db chunk).
The latter isn't probably the most object oriented solution, but here's what an asynchronous unit-test call does: Every unit test calls the same method-wrapper, and we pass-in the method-name/package-locale, plus the [...]args. A beginTransaction is done. The method is called, passing a false to the method for FE unit tests (to ignore the beginTransaction and commitTransaction lines), everything is run and the main 'response' class is generated and returned to the unit test method. A db-rollback is run and the response is returned to the unit test.
All of our unit tests are based on rolling-back transactions. I couldn't tell you of the issues that they had when setting up that jive, but that's my general understanding of how schtuff works.
Hope that helps. Understandable if it doesn't.
Best of luck,
--jeremy
first time poster and TDD adopter. :-) I'll be a bit verbose so please bear with me.
I've recently started developing SOAP based web services using the Apache CXF framework, Spring and Commons Chain for implementing business flow. The problem I'm facing here is with testing the web services -- testing as in Unit testing and functional testing.
My first attempt at Unit testing was a complete failure. To keep the unit tests flexible, I used a Spring XML file to keep my test data in. Also, instead of creating instances of "components" to be tested, I retrieved them from my Spring Application context. The XML files which harbored data quickly got out of hand; creating object graphs in XML turned out to be a nightmare. Since the "components" to be tested were picked from the Spring Application Context, each test run loaded all the components involved in my application, the DAO objects used etc. Also, as opposed to the concept of unit test cases being centralized or concentrated on testing only the component, my unit tests started hitting databases, communicating with mail servers etc. Bad, really bad.
I knew what I had done wrong and started to think of ways to rectify it. Following an advice from one of the posts on this board, I looked up Mockito, the Java mocking framework so that I could do away with using real DAO classes and mail servers and just mock the functionality.
With unit tests a bit under control, this brings me to my second problem; the dependence on data. The web services which I have been developing have very little logic but heavy reliance on data. As an example, consider one of my components:
public class PaymentScheduleRetrievalComponent implements Command {
public boolean execute(Context ctx) {
Policy policy = (Policy)ctx.get("POLICY");
List<PaymentSchedule> list = billingDAO.getPaymentStatementForPolicy(policy);
ctx.put("PAYMENT_SCHEDULE_LIST", list);
return false;
}
}
A majority of my components follow the same route -- pick a domain object from the context, hit the DAO [we are using iBatis as the SQL mapper here] and retrieve the result.
So, now the questions:
- How are DAO classes tested esp when a single insertion or updation might leave the database in a "unstable" state [in cases where let's say 3 insertions into different tables actually form a single transaction]?
- What is the de-facto standard for functional testing web services which move around a lot of data i.e. mindless insertions/retrievals from the data store?
Your personal experiences/comments would be greatly appreciated. Please let me know in case I've missed out some details on my part in explaining the problem at hand.
-sasuke
I would stay well away from the "Context as global hashmap" 'pattern' if I were you.
Looks like you are testing your persistence mapping...
You might want to take a look at: testing persistent objects without spring
I would recommend an in-memory database for running your unit tests against, such as HSQL. You can use this to create your schema on the fly (for example if you are using Hibernate, you can use your XML mappings files), then insert/update/delete as required before destroying the database at the end of your unit test. At no time will your test interfere with your actual database.
For you second problem (end-to-end testing of web services), I have successfully unit tested CXF-based services in the past. The trick is to publish your web service using a light-weight web server at the beginning of your test (Jetty is ideal), then use CXF to point a client to your web service endpoint, run your calls, then finally shut down the Jetty instance hosting your web service once your unit test has completed.
To achive this, you can use the JaxWsServerFactoryBean (server-side) and JaxWsProxyFactoryBean (client-side) classes provided with CXF, see this page for sample code:
http://cwiki.apache.org/CXF20DOC/a-simple-jax-ws-service.html#AsimpleJAX-WSservice-Publishingyourservice
I would also give a big thumbs up to SOAP UI for doing functional testing of your web service. JMeter is also extremely useful for stress testing web services, which is particularity important for those services doing database lookups.
First of all: Is there a reason you have to retrieve the subject under test (SUT) from the Spring Application context? For efficient unit testing you should be able to create the SUT without the context. It sounds like you have some hidden dependencies somewhere. That might be the root of some of your headache.
How are DAO classes tested esp when a
single insertion or updation might
leave the database in a "unstable"
state [in cases where let's say 3
insertions into different tables
actually form a single transaction]?
It seems you are worried about the database's constistency after you have running the tests. If possible use a own database for testing, where you don't need care about it. If you have such a sandbox database you can delete data as you wish. In this case I would do the following:
Flag all your fake data with some common identifier, like putting a special prefix to a field.
Before running the test drop a delete statement, which deletes the flagged data. If there is none, then nothing bad happens.
Run your single DAO test. After that repeat step 2. for the next test.
What is the de-facto standard for
functional testing web services which
move around a lot of data i.e.
mindless insertions/retrievals from
the data store?
I am not aware of any. From the question your are asking I can infer that you have on one side the web service and on the other side the database. Split up the responsibilities. Have separate test suites for each side. One side just testing database access (as described above). On the other side just testing web service requests and responses. In this case it pays of the stub/fake/mock the layer talking to the network. Or consider https://wsunit.dev.java.net/.
If the program is only shoving data in and out I think that there is not much behavior. If this is the case, then the hardest work is to unit test the database side and the web service side. The point is you can do unit testing without the need for "realistic" data. For functional testing you will need handrolled data, which is close to reality. This might be cumbersome, but if you already unit tested the database and web service parts intensively, this should reduce the need for "realistic" test cases considerably.
First of all, make thing clear.
In an ideal world the lifecycle of the software your are building is something like this:
- sy makes a report with the customer, so you got an user story with examples about how the application should work
- you generalize the user story, so you got rules, which you call as use cases
- you start to write a piece of functional (end to end) test, and it fails...
- after that your build the ui and mock out the services, so you got a green functional test and a specification about how your services should work...
- your job is to keep the functional test green, and implement the services step by step writing integration tests, and mocking out dependencies with the same approach until you reach the level of unit tests
- after that you do the next iteration with the use cases, write the next piece of functional test, and so on until the end of the project
- after that you make acceptance tests with the customer who accepts the product and pays a lot
So what did we learn from this:
There are many types of tests (don't confuse them with each other)
functional tests - for testing the use cases (mock out nothing)
integration tests - for testing application, component, module, class interactions (mock out the irrelevant components)
unit tests - for testing a single class in isolation from its environment (mock out everything)
user acceptance tests - customer makes sure, that she accepts the product (manual functional tests, or presentation made from automatic functional tests in working)
You don't need to test everything by functional tests and integration tests, because it is impossible. Test only the relevant part by functional and integration tests and test everything by unit tests! Familiarize yourself with the testing pyramid.
Use TDD, it makes life easier!
How are DAO classes tested esp when a single insertion or updation might leave the database in a "unstable" state [in cases where let's
say 3 insertions into different tables actually form a single
transaction]?
You don't have to test your database transactions. Assume, that they are working well, because database developers have already tested them, and I am sure you don't want to write concurrency tests... Db is an external component, so you don't have to test it yourself. You can write a data access layer to adapt the data storage to your system, and write integration tests only for those adapters. In case of database migration these tests will work by the adapters of the new database as well, because your write them to implement a specific interface... By any other tests (except functional tests) you can mock out your data access layer. Do the same with every other external component as well, write adapters and mock them out. Put these kind of integration tests to a different test suite than the other tests, because they are slow because of database access, filesystem access, etc...
What is the de-facto standard for functional testing web services which move around a lot of data i.e. mindless insertions/retrievals
from the data store?
Your can mock out your data store with an in memory db which implements the same storage adapters until you implemented everything else except the database. After that your implement the data access layer for the database and test it with your functional tests as well. It will be slow, but it has to run only once, for example by every new release... If you need functional tests by developing, you can mock it out with an in memory solution again... An alternative approach to run only the affected functional tests by developing, or modify the settings of the test db to make things faster, and so on... I am sure there are many test optimization solutions...
I must say I don't really understand
your exact problem. Is the problem
that your database is left in an
altered state after you've run the
test?
Yes, there are actually two issues here. First one being the problem with the database left in an inconsistent state after running the test cases. The second one being that I'm looking for an elegant solution in terms of end-to-end testing of web services.
For efficient unit testing you should
be able to create the SUT without the
context. It sounds like you have some
hidden dependencies somewhere. That
might be the root of some of your
headache.
That indeed was the root cause of my headaches which I am now about to do away with with the help of a mocking framework.
It seems you are worried about the
database's constistency after you have
running the tests. If possible use a
own database for testing, where you
don't need care about it. If you have
such a sandbox database you can delete
data as you wish.
This is indeed one of the solutions to the problem I mentioned in my previous post but this might not work in all the cases esp when integrating with a legacy system in which the database/data isn't in your control and in cases when some DAO methods require a certain data to be already present in a given set of tables. Should I look into database unit testing frameworks like DBUnit?
In this case it pays of the
stub/fake/mock the layer talking to
the network. Or consider
https://wsunit.dev.java.net/.
Ah, looks interesting. I've also heard of tools like SOAPUI and the likes which can be used for functional testing. Has anyone here had any success with such tools?
Thanks for all the answers and apologies for the ambiguous explanation; English isn't my first language.
-sasuke