Spring – How to test a mocked JNDI datasource with Spring

You can get some information :

From Martin Fowler about Mock and Stub

Fake objects actually have working implementations, but usually take some shortcut which makes them not suitable for production

Stubs provide canned answers to calls made during the test, usually not responding at all to anything outside what's programmed in for the test. Stubs may also record information about calls, such as an email gateway stub that remembers the messages it 'sent', or maybe only how many messages it 'sent'.

Mocks are what we are talking about here: objects pre-programmed with expectations which form a specification of the calls they are expected to receive.

From xunitpattern:

Fake: We acquire or build a very lightweight implementation of the same functionality as provided by a component that the SUT depends on and instruct the SUT to use it instead of the real.

Stub : This implementation is configured to respond to calls from the SUT with the values (or exceptions) that will exercise the Untested Code (see Production Bugs on page X) within the SUT. A key indication for using a Test Stub is having Untested Code caused by the inability to control the indirect inputs of the SUT

Mock Object that implements the same interface as an object on which the SUT (System Under Test) depends. We can use a Mock Object as an observation point when we need to do Behavior Verification to avoid having an Untested Requirement (see Production Bugs on page X) caused by an inability to observe side-effects of invoking methods on the SUT.

Personally

I try to simplify by using : Mock and Stub. I use Mock when it's an object that returns a value that is set to the tested class. I use Stub to mimic an Interface or Abstract class to be tested. In fact, it doesn't really matter what you call it, they are all classes that aren't used in production, and are used as utility classes for testing.

If using Spring's XML schema based configuration, setup in the Spring context like this:

<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xmlns:jee="http://www.springframework.org/schema/jee" xsi:schemaLocation="
    http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd
    http://www.springframework.org/schema/jee http://www.springframework.org/schema/jee/spring-jee.xsd">
...
<jee:jndi-lookup id="dbDataSource"
   jndi-name="jdbc/DatabaseName"
   expected-type="javax.sql.DataSource" />

Alternatively, setup using simple bean configuration like this:

<bean id="DatabaseName" class="org.springframework.jndi.JndiObjectFactoryBean">
    <property name="jndiName" value="java:comp/env/jdbc/DatabaseName"/>
</bean>

You can declare the JNDI resource in tomcat's server.xml using something like this:

<GlobalNamingResources>
    <Resource name="jdbc/DatabaseName"
              auth="Container"
              type="javax.sql.DataSource"
              username="dbUser"
              password="dbPassword"
              url="jdbc:postgresql://localhost/dbname"
              driverClassName="org.postgresql.Driver"
              initialSize="20"
              maxWaitMillis="15000"
              maxTotal="75"
              maxIdle="20"
              maxAge="7200000"
              testOnBorrow="true"
              validationQuery="select 1"
              />
</GlobalNamingResources>

And reference the JNDI resource from Tomcat's web context.xml like this:

  <ResourceLink name="jdbc/DatabaseName"
   global="jdbc/DatabaseName"
   type="javax.sql.DataSource"/>

Reference documentation:

• Tomcat 8 JNDI Datasource HOW-TO
• Tomcat 8 Context Resource Links Reference
• Spring 4 JEE JNDI Lookup XML Schema Reference
• Spring 4 JndiObjectFactoryBean Javadoc

Edit: This answer has been updated for Tomcat 8 and Spring 4. There have been a few property name changes for Tomcat's default datasource resource pool setup.