I don't know how to apply unit tests on data access layer. I always wonder if the data access layer should be tested. In my company, we have stable database to store unit test data and test data access layer by running data access objects and check the data they get from the stable database.
In order to pass the unit tests, data in the stable database can not be modified anymore. I think there is a better solution to this. If I am not mistaken, the the mock object cannot perform tests on SQL statements and ResultSet mappings.
What is the best way to unit test the DAO? Is there a better way to do this with TDD?
First, by most definitions, "unit" tests do not depend on external systems like a database. You want to create what are called "functional" or "integration" tests. In practice these types of tests will be implemented in the same way as unit tests, using something like Junit, but you should separate them from unit tests, which should run very fast and not break when your database is down or the data has changed.
Second, try to keep most of your business logic out of DAOs and instead put it into a service POJO layer so that you can test biz logic without involving the database.
Next, the ideal way to set up testing for DAOs is to start with an empty database, and load it with test data (often using the DAOs themselves), and then run your DAO tests against a known, and writable, test dataset. If you're fortunate enough to have a read-only database, the stable database approach you outline will work, but most systems are read/write to the database.
Finally, it is valuable to test DAOs. Often the database queries are some of the most fragile parts of your system, and you don't want to wait until they are deployed to production to find out they are breaking.
Strictly speaking, you're writing a functional test. To do this you're going to need a test database of one sort or another. Let's talk about your options.
HSQL/in-memory DB. Small and fast. Trivial to setup and get rolling, and great performance on unit test sized data. The downside is, unless you are deploying using these environments then you risk having your unit test work but actual code fail. It also means you can't use any SQL constructs which are not support in both HSQL and your production DB. This can be mitigated to an extent by using Hibernate or similar. A good way to go if you only have very simple queries.
Mock out the DB calls entirely. Pointless unless you are doing too much heavy lifting in your DAO.
Use a test instance of your production DB. This will give you the best results in terms of accuracy or results. It will let you test to make sure that all your calls work as expected and lets you use non-portable SQL. You can use something like DBUnit to load database data or just use the DAO under test to do it. I would recommend this if you large and nasty queries. Ones with a lot of edge cases, roll-up views and subtle behavior. The downside is that real DBs will incur performance penalties since they'll be doing real work (transactions, index updates, rollback support).
Some comments/suggestions:
The DAO test is aimed at verifying whether the queries fired and the data retrieved are as per the expectations. There should hardly any business logic to test in DAO.
Since the prime objective is test the database interaction, mocking is not going to make it foolproof, specially the edge cases.
In light of this, the approach that you have right now is fair enough. I am not sure why you feel that its not good. A little elaboration will help.
If you are not convenient on using external database, then you can use Java's inbuilt javaDB for this. Please note that there will be overhead of creating the test data first before you run this test.
For JDBC based project, JDBC connection can be mocked, so that tests can be executed without live RDBMS, with each test case isolated (no data conflict).
It allow to verify, persistence code passes proper queries/parameters (e.g. https://github.com/playframework/playframework/blob/master/framework/src/anorm/src/test/scala/anorm/ParameterSpec.scala) and handle JDBC results (parsing/mapping) as expected.
Framework like jOOQ or my framework Acolyte can be used for: https://github.com/cchantep/acolyte .
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.
It is often said when unit testing to dont test the database as that is an integration test (see point 4).
However, SQL/JPQL/HQL encapsulate data store specific logic which is often in string format on how to access data. This free form string data access command can easily go wrong and hence needs to be tested.
How do i efficiently test this sort of logic?
The closest you can get to running a unit test against an SQL (or similar framework) query, is to set up a SQLite database in memory, and run against it.
While that still is technically an integration test, it runs almost as fast as a unit test should.
If you do so, just take care to note the slight differences between SQLite and your real database, and try to make your queries compatible with both.
Hope this helps,
Assaf.
It is not a unit test, but there is nothing with using a unit testing framework like Nunit to test your sql. But it IS important that you keep it separated from the real unit tests. Real unit tests are fast and does not communicate with the outside ... nor do they attempt to alter it by updates, deletes and inserts.
I am trying to figure out the best way(s) to test Service and DAO layers. So, a few sub questions...
When testing a service layer, is it best to test against a mock DAO layer or a "live" DAO layer pointed at a testing environment?
How should SQL in the DAO layer be tested when the only test database is in a shared environment (Oracle/DB2)
How do you solve the paradox of any DAO writes/updates need to be tested with DAO reads which is something that also has to be tested?
I am looking for any good documentation, articles, or references in this area along with any tools to help automate the process. I already know about JUint for unit testing and Hudson for CI.
Get Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests. It has some great tips about how to test database access.
Personally, I usually break the DAO tests in 2, a unit test with a mocked database to test functionality on the DAO, and an integration test, to test the queries against the DB. If your DAO only has database access code, you won't need a unit test.
One of the suggestions from the book that I took, is that the (integration) test has to commit the changes to the DB. I've learn to do this, after using hibernate and figuring out that the test was marked for rollback and the DB never got the insert statement. If you use triggers or any kind of validation (even FKs) I think this is a must.
Another thing, stay away from dbunit, it's a great framwork to start working, but it becomes hellish when a project becomes something more than tiny. My preference here, is to have a set of Test Data Builder classes to create the data, and insert it in the setup of the test or in the test itself.
And check dbmigrate, it's not for testing, but it will help you to manage scripts to upgrade and downgrade your DB schema.
In the scenario where the DB server is shared, I've creates one schema/user per environment. Since each developer has his own "local" environment, he also owns one schema.
Here are my answers :
Use mock DAOs to test your services. Much easier, mush faster. Use EasyMock or Mockito or any other mock framework to test the service layer.
Give each developer its own database schema to execute his tests. Such schemas are typically empty : the unit tests populate the database with a small test data set before running a test, and empties it once the test is completed. Use DBUnit for this.
If the reads work against a well-defined, static, test data set (which you should unit-test), then you can rely on them to unit-test the writes. But you can also use ad-hoc queries or even DBUnit to test that the writes work as expected. The fact that the tests are not necessarily run in this order doesn't matter. If everything passes, then everything is OK.
I am soon writing a unit test to a service tier-class that relies heavily to org.springframework.jdbc.object.StoredProcedure class.
The service object is going to be simple batch class, reading data from a stored-procedure, aggregating it and sending it to a another stored-procedure.
What would be a best practice regarding such an unit test (since it relies heavily to a database). Should I use a fake object (set of method stubs), write a mock with a database backend or mirror the real thing (with the cost of keeping the infrastructure up to date)?
I want be as lazy as possible and still guarantee quality.
Personally, I would do the unit tests in a case like this with an embedded database like H2.
Hope this helps.
I would not worry about testing end-to-end in this case. I would stub out the calls to the stored proc and make sure your code works as expected.
The next thing to do is test the stored proc. If you are on an oracle platform then you can test-drive the proc using ruby-plsql. I have used this on a project before and it works well. If you are not on an oracle platform then you are going to have to build something in your test harness that can call the stored proc in such ways that you will see the different outcomes. Just shoot for the happy path and a few edge cases.
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