When I’m integration testing Grails service classes, I often want to mock off a part of the class so that a complicated code branch isn’t followed that I’m not trying to test.
Grails will helpfully inject fully autowired Spring service beans into my test if I ask for them. Unfortunately, if I change the metaClass of the injected service, that change persists beyond where we want it to:
class MyService {
def myMethod() { "unmodified" }
}
class MyServiceTests extends GroovyTestCase {
def myService // injected automatically by spring/grails
void testOne() {
myService.metaClass.myMethod = {-> "modified" }
assertEquals "modified", myService.myMethod()
}
void testTwo() {
assertEquals "unmodified", myService.myMethod() // WTF! Returns "modified", pollution from first test
}
}Grails services are Spring “singleton” objects. They’re not true singletons though, singleton’s are just cached in the application context and returned whenever getBean is called.
Historically, if I wanted to mock part of my service manually, I’d need to “new” up my own instance of the service and manually inject any dependencies that the service might need to function. This is both painful and fragile, if the service adds or removes dependencies, chances are that the tests are going to break.
I realized that if I could ask Grails/Spring for a new instance of the “singleton” service that I could muck with it all I wanted in my test without worrying about polluting other tests with my changes. After some digging into the grails spring support, I came up with the following method that could be added to an integration test (or integration test base class):
// spring "singleton" objects really aren't they're just cached by their application context
def getNewSingletonInstanceOf(Class clazz) {
String beanName = "prototype${clazz.name}"
BeanBuilder beanBuilder = new BeanBuilder(ApplicationHolder.application.mainContext)
beanBuilder.beans {
"$beanName"(clazz) { bean ->
bean.autowire = 'byName'
}
}
beanBuilder.createApplicationContext().getBean(beanName)
}This method uses the BeanBuilder to construct a temporary ApplicationContext with the Grails mainContext as a parent so that other dependencies can be resolved. This method won’t work if your service has changes to how it’s wired up and configured by spring, but the majority of Grails service classes are simply autowired byName.
Here’s a more detailed example of use. Given this service:
package com.example
class MyService {
def injectedService
def serviceMethod() {
return otherMethod()
}
def otherMethod() {
return "original value"
}
}I’m able to generate per-test autowired instances of my service and mock out otherMethod without polluting other tests (or the Spring injected version of the bean):
package com.example
import grails.spring.BeanBuilder
import org.codehaus.groovy.grails.commons.ApplicationHolder
class MyServiceTests extends GroovyTestCase {
def myServiceInstance // our new
def myService // spring injected version
protected void setUp() {
super.setUp()
myServiceInstance = getNewSingletonInstanceOf(MyService)
}
protected void tearDown() {
super.tearDown()
}
// spring "singleton" objects really aren't they're just cached by their application context
def getNewSingletonInstanceOf(Class clazz) {
String beanName = "prototype${clazz.name}"
BeanBuilder beanBuilder = new BeanBuilder(ApplicationHolder.application.mainContext)
beanBuilder.beans {
"$beanName"(clazz) { bean ->
bean.autowire = 'byName'
}
}
beanBuilder.createApplicationContext().getBean(beanName)
}
void testNewSingletonInstance() {
assertNotNull myServiceInstance // created uniquely for this test in setUp
assertNotNull myService // spring injected into integration test
assertNotSame myService, myServiceInstance
// we've got unique instances of MyService, but both are injected with the same singleton dependencies
assertSame myService.injectedService, myServiceInstance.injectedService
}
void testMessingWithMetaClassDoesNotAffectOriginalSingleton() {
myServiceInstance.metaClass.otherMethod = {-> "new value" }
assertEquals "new value", myServiceInstance.serviceMethod()
assertEquals "original value", myService.serviceMethod()
def anotherInstance = getNewSingletonInstanceOf(MyService)
assertEquals "original value", anotherInstance.serviceMethod()
}
}Using this technique lets you leverage Spring’s autowiring in your tests, but also gives you the flexibility to override areas not under test to improve test readability and maintainability.