Tutorials : StrutsTestCase: The Tool for Struts Unit testing :

StrutsTestCase: The Tool for Struts Unit testing

by Keld H. Hansen

Introduction

The Struts framework from the Jakarta project is one of the most successful open source projects around today.

Part of every IT-project includes testing, and Struts projects are no different. If we look at testing "from the bottom up", we start by unit testing the classes and methods we're developing. Extreme programmers actually write their unit test cases before the code they're supposed to test! As the project progresses, we step up through the application architecture to module, integration and system testing. You may use different words for your test phases, but the idea is to start at the very detailed level and finish by letting the end users test the functionality of the system, in order to see that what they get is what was promised to be delivered!

This article is about unit testing a part of your Struts application, specifically how you test the Action class. Let's see where the Action class fits into the Struts architecture:

Figure 1: The Struts architecture

The Action class is the glue between the Struts ActionServlet and your business logic (the "Model"). Before testing your Action classes you'll normally have finished unit testing your business logic, and since these classes are normal Java classes which should have no connections to the servlet environment, you might have been using JUnit for the task. JUnit is also from the open source area, and it's just as popular as Struts. If you need to brush up your knowledge on JUnit I can recommend this tutorial on JUnit.      

If you know JUnit you'll be happy to also learn that an extension exists which makes it possible to test the Action classes. This may come as a surprise, since testing the Action class is quite another thing than testing a class from your business logic. When you test a method from the business logic you write a small program that calls the method, and afterwards you check the outcome of this call. Testing the Action class is the same as testing the execute method (in pre Struts 1.1 it was called perform), but how would you call this method? The signature of the method is this:

	   
public ActionForward execute(ActionMapping mapping,
             ActionForm form,
             HttpServletRequest request,
             HttpServletResponse response) 

In order to make the call you'd have to supply four troublesome parameters, giving access to the Struts set-up and the servlet environment. No easy task. To our rescue comes StrutsTestCase.

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