Myfaces Test Framework Project

Modern application development processes have embraced the idea of unit testing as an integral step in creating high quality software. In the Java world, a popular framework for building and executing such unit tests is the JUnit framework. It is straightforward for an application developer to create a corresponding test case class for each class in the application itself, and ensure that the tests contained in the test case get executed as part of the normal application build process.

One of the advantages of unit testing is that a test case should focus only on the methods of the class under test, in isolation from related application classes, or APIs provided by any container that the class under test might be installed into at runtime. But, how do you test an application class that has dependencies on such APIs (such as depending on the Servlet API to provide an HttpServletRequest object representing an incoming HTTP request)?

A popular answer to this dilemma is to utilize a library of mock objects -- classes that implement and emulate the container APIs, but still run in the isolated environment of a JUnit test case. Myfaces provides mock object implementations for its own features, as well as features of the underlying container (Servlet and JavaServer Faces) environment. In addition, convenient base classes are provided to make it very easy to build your own test cases utilizing these mock objects. This library is used to create unit tests for Myfaces components itself, but it is primarily focused on making it easy to build unit tests for application classes such as ViewControllers.

Provided Services

The Myfaces Test Framework provides mock object libraries, plus base classes for creating your own JUnit TestCases.

Mock objects are provided in package org.apache.myfaces.test.mock for the following container APIs:

• JavaServer Faces
• Servlet

These mock object classes implement the majority of the functionality defined by the container API Javadocs (although some methods currently throw UnsupportedOperationException). In addition, many of these classes support public methods, outside of the defined API, for configuring the object in a test environment. For example, MockServletContext includes addInitParameter() and setDocumentRoot() methods, to add context initialization parameters to the set returned via getInitParameter() and getInitParameterNames(), and to establish the base directory for resolving servlet context resources, respectively.

The org.apache.myfaces.test.base package contains abstract base classes that wire together instances of the various container API mock objects, in a manner similar to the way they would become available at runtime. The following base classes are available:

• org.apache.myfaces.test.base.AbstractJsfTestCase - Base class for unit tests that require Servlet and JavaServer Faces objects to be available in a junit 3 style.
• org.apache.myfaces.test.base.AbstractViewControllerTestCase - Extension of AbstractJsfTestCase that also provides convenient utility methods needed to test common scenarios in unit tests for ViewController implementation classes in a junit 3 style.
• org.apache.myfaces.test.base.junit4.AbstractJsfTestCase - Base class for unit tests that require Servlet and JavaServer Faces objects to be available in a junit 4 style.
• org.apache.myfaces.test.base.AbstractViewControllerTestCase - Extension of AbstractJsfTestCase that also provides convenient utility methods needed to test common scenarios in unit tests for ViewController implementation classes in a junit 4 style.
• org.apache.myfaces.test.base.junit4.AbstractJsfConfigurableMockTestCase - Base class for unit tests that require Servlet and JavaServer Faces objects to be available in a junit 4 style. It to allows override mock objects to use the "real" ones in cases where it is required to test specific parts of myfaces, or create test cases that requires parts of a jsf implementation to work (see on myfaces-impl 2.0.x base class org.apache.myfaces.view.facelets.FaceletTestCase)

If you use one of these base classes, the setUp() method found there will initialize a set of protected instance variables for the container-managed objects you might need to access. The set of initialized variables includes (variable name and type):

• application (MockApplication)
• config (MockServletConfig)
• externalContext (MockExternalContext)
• facesContext (MockFacesContext)
• lifecycle (MockLifecycle)
• request (MockHttpServletRequest)
• response (MockHttpServletResonse)
• servletContext (MockServletContext)
• session (MockHttpSession)