Tutorials : StrutsTestCase: The Tool for Struts Unit testing :

Introducing StrutsTestCase

StrutsTestCase is an open source project from SourceForge, which extends the JUnit framework to allow testing the Action class. It even offers two approaches: one that uses the servlet container employing the Cactus framework from Jakarta, and one that simulates the container. This article will explain how to use the simulated set-up, or the "mock object approach". 

The idea behind the StrutsTestCase (STC) framework is that it's not you that calls the execute method, but STC. So it's up to STC to supply the four parameters to the execute method, and when you use the mock object approach, these parameters will be simulated. The request and response objects don't come from a servlet container, they're set-up by STC. The mapping and form parameters however, are created by STC by reading the struts- config file.

One of the things you'll soon get curious about is how well STC can simulate the request and response objects. The answer is: pretty well, but it doesn't do the job 100% perfectly. We'll revert to this topic later.

Let's have a look at a simple STC testprogram:

Listing 1: A StrutsTestCase program

package hansen.playground; import servletunit.struts.*; public class TestStrutsAction extends MockStrutsTestCase { public void setUp() throws Exception { super.setUp(); } public void tearDown() throws Exception { super.tearDown(); } public TestStrutsAction(String testName) { super(testName); } public void testList() { setRequestPathInfo("/list"); actionPerform(); verifyForward("list"); verifyNoActionErrors(); } public static void main(String[] args) { junit.textui.TestRunner.run(TestStrutsAction.class); } }

The class structure will be familiar to JUnit users:

• the setUp and tearDown methods are called before and after every test method respectively in the class
• every method that's supposed to test something must have a name starting with "test"
• the main method calls one of the three TestRunner interfaces

MockStrutsTestCase extends JUnit's TestCase class, so all of the "assert" methods from JUnit are available in the test methods.

What's not familiar are the four statements in the testList method. Let's have a closer look at them:

setRequestPathInfo("/list")

actionPerform()

verifyForward("list")

verifyNoActionErrors()

The snippet from the struts-config file could look like this:

<action   path="/list"
          type="hansen.playground.ListDVDAction">
    <forward name="list" path="/list.jsp"/>
</action>

I hope you appreciate the simplicity of the STC set-up. It's no big deal to get started testing your Struts actions, so what we need now is a Struts application and a download of STC. Let's take the application first.

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