How to do unit test on JPA

It will be very inconvenient to test JPA DAO classes if you need to build and deploy the application to an application server. You can actually do unit tests on JPA without using any application server. The following is one example.

1. The entity class.

@Entity
@Table(name = "T_SAMPLE")
public class SampleData implements Serializable {

 private SampleDataId id;
 private String xyz;
 
 @EmbeddedId
 public SampleDataId getId() {
  return this.id;
 }

 public void setId(final SampleDataId id) {
  this.id = id;
 }


 @Column(name = "XYZ")
 public String getXyz() {
  return this.xyz;
 }

 public void setXyz(final String xyz) {
  this.xyz = xyz;
 }

}

2. The DAO class to be tested.

packge com.example.dao;

@Repository
public class SampleDataDAO {
 protected static final Logger LOG = Logger.getLogger(SampleDataDAO.class);

  @PersistenceContext
  private EntityManager entityManager;

 /**
  * Returns List of SampleData type.
  */
 public List<SampleData> getSomeData() {
   List<SampleData> results = new ArrayList<SampleData>();
   EntityManager entityManager = getEntityManager();
   final CriteriaBuilder builder = entityManager.getCriteriaBuilder();
   final CriteriaQuery<SampleData> query = builder
     .createQuery(SampleData.class);
   final Root<SampleData> root = query.from(SampleData.class);
   List<Predicate> predicates = new ArrayList<Predicate>();
   query.select(root);
    ......
   query.where(predicates.toArray(new Predicate[] {}));

   results = entityManager.createQuery(query).getResultList();
   return results;
 }

public void saveSomeData(SampleData sampleData) {
   EntityManager entityManager = getEntityManager();
   entityManager.persist(sampleData); 
 }
}

3. The test class:

@RunWith(SpringJUnit4ClassRunner.class)
@ContextConfiguration(locations = { "/testApplicationContext.xml" })
public class SampleDataDAOTest {

 @Autowired
 private SampleDataDAO sampleDataDAO;

 @Test
 public void testRead() {
  sampleDataDAO.getSomeData(...);
 }

 @Test
 @Transactional
 public SampleData testSave() {
  SampleData sampleData = new SampleData();
  sampleData.setXyz("bla");
  sampleDataDAO.saveSomeData(sampleData);
  SampleData savedData = sampleDataDAO.getSampleDataById(sampleData.getId());
  Assert.assertNotNull(savedData);
  return savedData;
 }
}

Notes:

1. The method testSave() has the annotation @Transactional. Without this annotation, the test won't work. The savedData will be null. The @Transactional annotation has to appear somewhere. If the method saveSomeData of sampleDataDAO is annotated with @Transactional, then it is also fine.
2. The good thing about using @Transactional on the method of a Junit test class is that Spring will automatically rollback the transaction after the test is done. So the above test method testSave() won't actually create a record in the database after the test. Below is from Spring documentation.

   In the TestContext framework, transactions are managed by the TransactionalTestExecutionListener. Note that TransactionalTestExecutionListener is configured by default, even if you do not explicitly declare @TestExecutionListeners on your test class. To enable support for transactions, however, you must provide a PlatformTransactionManager bean in the application context loaded by @ContextConfiguration semantics. In addition, you must declare @Transactional either at the class or method level for your tests.

4. The configuration file app/src/test/resources/testApplicationContext.xml.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
    xmlns:p="http://www.springframework.org/schema/p" xmlns:tx="http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx"
    xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd
http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx
http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx/spring-tx-3.0.xsd
http://www.springframework.org/schema/context
http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-3.0.xsd">
 
    <bean id="dataSource" class="org.apache.commons.dbcp.BasicDataSource"
        p:driverClassName="oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleDriver" p:url="jdbc:oracle:thin:@myurl"
        p:username="myUsername" p:password="myPassword" p:initialSize="5" p:maxActive="10">
    </bean>
 
    <bean
        class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.LocalContainerEntityManagerFactoryBean"
        id="entityManagerFactory">
        <property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource" />
    </bean>

 
    <context:component-scan base-package="com.example.dao">
    </context:component-scan>
 
    <bean class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.JpaTransactionManager"
        id="transactionManager">
        <property name="entityManagerFactory" ref="entityManagerFactory" />
    </bean>
 
   
    <context:spring-configured />
    <context:annotation-config />
    <tx:annotation-driven transaction-manager="transactionManager" />
</beans>

5. The file app/src/main/java/META-INF/persistence.xml:

   <persistence xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence"
 version="1.0">

 <persistence-unit name="MY-UNIT" transaction-type="RESOURCE_LOCAL">
  <provider>org.hibernate.ejb.HibernatePersistence</provider>
  <non-jta-data-source>dataSource</non-jta-data-source>
  <properties>
   <property name="hibernate.dialect" value="org.hibernate.dialect.Oracle10gDialect" />
   <!-- property name="hibernate.cache.provider_class" value="org.hibernate.cache.NoCacheProvider"/ -->
   <property name="hibernate.show_sql" value="true" />
   <property name="hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto" value="none" />
   <prop key="hibernate.connection.autocommit">false</prop>
   <prop key="hibernate.connection.release_mode">after_transaction</prop>
  </properties>
 </persistence-unit>

</persistence> 

Note that the output log will show that this persistence unit is used.

Question. The test needs to use the Entity class SampleData.java. How is this class discovered in the test context?

Answer: The document http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/stable/entitymanager/reference/en/html/configuration.html#setup-configuration-bootstrapping has good explaintion. It seems that by default, JPA will discover all the classes annotated with @Entity in the archive in the bootstrap process.

2.2.1. Packaging

The configuration for entity managers both inside an application server and in a standalone application reside in a persistence archive. 
A persistence archive is a JAR file which must define a persistence.xml file that resides in the META-INF folder. 
All properly annotated classes included in the archive (ie. having an @Entity annotation), all annotated packages and all 
Hibernate hbm.xml files included in the archive will be added to the persistence unit configuration, so by default, 
your persistence.xml will be quite minimalist:


<persistence xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence"
             xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
             xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence/persistence_2_0.xsd"
             version="2.0">
   <persistence-unit name="sample">
      <jta-data-source>java:/DefaultDS</jta-data-source>
      <properties>
         <property name="hibernate.dialect" value="org.hibernate.dialect.HSQLDialect"/>
         <property name="hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto" value="create-drop"/>
      </properties>
   </persistence-unit>
</persistence>

The actual command line of the test run is something like below:

C:\tools\jre-7u79-windows-x64\jre1.7.0_79\bin\javaw.exe -ea 
-classpath C:\Users\me\workspace\app\target\test-classes;
C:\Users\me\workspace\app\target\classes;
......
 -testLoaderClass org.eclipse.jdt.internal.junit4.runner.JUnit4TestLoader 
-loaderpluginname org.eclipse.jdt.junit4.runtime 
-classNames com.sample.dao.SampleDataDAOTest

Debugging of the program shows the following details. 1. The file testApplicationContext.xml has the bean entityManagerFactory of the class org.springframework.orm.jpa.LocalContainerEntityManagerFactoryBean. 2. When this bean is created, its method afterPropertiesSet() calls HibernatePersistence.createContainerEntityManagerFactory(), which calls Ejb3Configuration.buildEntityManagerFactory(), and so on. Eventually it will create a map that contains all the classes with the annotation @Entity. The last few classes used in this chain of call are JPA or Hibernate classes which are not related to Spring. So these classes must have the builtin ability to discover the @Entity classes by following the JPA standards.

Note that if you just use Hibernate without using the generic JPA,then you use the configuration file hibernate.cfg.xml. And you can list the entity classes or packages in that file as the following example shows.

  <hibernate-configuration>
     <session-factory>
       <property name="hibernate.connection.driver_class>"com.mysql.mysql.Driver</property>
       ......
       <mapping class="com.sample.SampleData"/>
     </session-factory>
   </hibernate-configuration>

CDI, Tomcat and JPA

Contexts and Dependency Injection (CDI) for the Java EE platform is one of several Java EE 6 features that help to knit together the web tier and the transactional tier of the Java EE platform. CDI is a set of services that, used together, make it easy for developers to use enterprise beans along with JavaServer Faces technology in web applications. Designed for use with stateful objects, CDI also has many broader uses, allowing developers a great deal of flexibility to integrate various kinds of components in a loosely coupled but typesafe way.

Tomcat (Tomcat 7 in this blog) is a web container. It is not a Java EE container. So it does not recognize @PersistenceContex, @EJB, etc.

Say we have the persistence.xml file for JPA(Java Persistence API) in the META-INF folder.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> 
<persistence xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence" 
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 
xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence/persistence_2_0.xsd" 
version="2.0"> 
   <persistence-unit name="my_unit"> 
     <provider>org.hibernate.ejb.HibernatePersistence</provider> 
     <properties> 
        <property name="hibernate.dialect" value="org.hibernate.dialect.MySQL5InnoDBDialect" /> 
        <property name="hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto" value="update" /> 
        <property name="hibernate.connection.driver_class" value="com.mysql.jdbc.Driver" /> 
        <property name="hibernate.connection.username" value="username" /> 
        <property name="hibernate.connection.password" value="pwd" /> 
        <property name="hibernate.connection.url" value="jdbc:mysql://localhost/somepath" /> 
     </properties> 
   </persistence-unit> 
</persistence> 

 

In a Java EE server, you can inject EntityManager as below:

public class MyApp {

    @PersistenceContext(unitName = "my-unit")
    private EntityManager entityManager;

    public void doSomething {
        entityManager.persist(...);
    }
}
 

But this won't work in Tomcat. In Tomcat, typically you need to do the following to get the EntityManager.

 EntityManagerFactory emf = Persistence.createEntityManagerFactory("my_unit"); 
 EntityManager em = emf.createEntityManager(); 
 em.getTransaction().begin(); 
   // do some thing here
 em.getTransaction().commit(); 
 

There is a way so that you can still use @PersistenceContext in Tomcat. The trick is to use the Spring class PersistenceAnnotationBeanPostProcessor. Below is the Spring documentation of this class.

This post-processor will inject sub-interfaces of EntityManagerFactory and EntityManager if the annotated fields or methods are declared as such. The actual type will be verified early, with the exception of a shared ("transactional") EntityManager reference, where type mismatches might be detected as late as on the first actual invocation.

Note: In the present implementation, PersistenceAnnotationBeanPostProcessor only supports @PersistenceUnit and @PersistenceContext with the "unitName" attribute, or no attribute at all (for the default unit). If those annotations are present with the "name" attribute at the class level, they will simply be ignored, since those only serve as deployment hint (as per the Java EE 5 specification).

This post-processor can either obtain EntityManagerFactory beans defined in the Spring application context (the default), or obtain EntityManagerFactory references from JNDI ("persistence unit references"). In the bean case, the persistence unit name will be matched against the actual deployed unit, with the bean name used as fallback unit name if no deployed name found. Typically, Spring's LocalContainerEntityManagerFactoryBean will be used for setting up such EntityManagerFactory beans. Alternatively, such beans may also be obtained from JNDI, e.g. using the jee:jndi-lookup XML configuration element (with the bean name matching the requested unit name). In both cases, the post-processor definition will look as simple as this:

   <bean class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.support.PersistenceAnnotationBeanPostProcessor"/>

So in your Spring context.xml file, you can put something like the following:

 <bean id="entityManagerFactory"
  class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.LocalContainerEntityManagerFactoryBean">
  <property name="persistenceXmlLocation" value="classpath*:META-INF/persistence.xml" />
  <property name="persistenceUnitName" value="my_unit" />
  <property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource" />
  <property name="jpaVendorAdapter">
   <bean class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.vendor.HibernateJpaVendorAdapter">
    <property name="showSql" value="true" />
   </bean>
  </property>
  <property name="loadTimeWeaver">
   <bean
    class="org.springframework.instrument.classloading.InstrumentationLoadTimeWeaver" />
  </property>
   <property name="jpaDialect">
            <bean class="......"/>
        </property>
 </bean>
 <bean class="org.springframework.orm.jpa.support.PersistenceAnnotationBeanPostProcessor" />