The goal of this project is to faciliate the creation of integration tests for Spring MVC applications. At present it contains server-side support only but will have client-side support added as well.

This code is intended for inclusion in the spring-test module of the Spring Framework. Its present home here allows us to evolve it on a flexible release schedule and with community feedback potentially accommodating a wide range of scenarios.

Annotated-controllers depend on Spring MVC to handle many things such as mapping requests, performing data binding and validation, setting the response status, writing to the body of the response using the correct content type, and many more.

To test all that you may instantiate an in-memory Servlet container driving requests with JWebUnit or you may use a test tool such as JMeter or Selenium. These options however require running a Servlet container and can only perform black-box testing.

The aim of this project is to provide a more "lightweight" and more integrated alternative by building on the familiar MockHttpServletRequest and the MockHttpServletResponse from the spring-test module and without the need for a Servlet container. Whether you want to point to one controller or to test with your complete web application context setup, it should be easy to send a request and verify the results.

Test an @ResponseBody method in a controller:

MockMvcBuilders.standaloneMvcSetup(new TestController()).build()
    .perform(get("/form"))
        .andExpect(status(200))
        .andExpect(contentType("text/plain"))
        .andExpect(responseBody("content"));

Test binding failure by pointing to Spring MVC XML-based context configuration:

MockMvcBuilders.xmlConfigMvcSetup("classpath:org/examples/servlet-context.xml").build()
    .perform(get("/form"))
        .andExpect(status(200))
        .andExpect(modelAttributesWithErrors("formBean"))
        .andExpect(viewName("form"));

Test serving a resource by pointing to Spring MVC Java-based application configuration:

MockMvcBuilders.annotationConfigMvcSetup(TestConfiguration.class).build()
    .perform(get("/resources/Spring.js"))
        .andExpect(contentType("application/octet-stream"))
        .andExpect(responseBodyContains("Spring={};"));

For more examples see tests in the org.springframework.test.web.server package.

Most rendering technologies should work as expected. For Tiles and JSP, while you can test with your existing configuration as is, no actual JSP-based rendering will take place. Instead you should verify the path the request was forwarded to (i.e. the path to the JSP page) or you can also verify the selected view name.

If you see anything you'd like to change we encourage taking advantage of github's social coding features by making the change in a fork of this repository and sending a pull request.

To report an issue the Spring Framework forum or the Spring JIRA creating requests under the component "SpringTEST".

Before we accept a non-trivial patch or pull request we will need you to sign the [contributor's agreement] (https://support.springsource.com/spring_committer_signup). Signing the contributor's agreement does not grant anyone commit rights to the main repository, but it does mean that we can accept your contributions, and you will get an author credit if we do. Active contributors might be asked to join the core team, and given the ability to merge pull requests.

This project draws inspiration from similar server-side and client-side test support introduced in Spring Web Services 2.0.