Missing response data in Spring MVC Test

Question

I have a controller that writes to ModelMap as follows:

 @Controller @RequestMapping("/dataset") public class DatasetController { @Autowired DatasetDao datasetDao; @RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.GET) public String getDataset(@RequestParam String name, ModelMap model) { Dataset ds = datasetDao.get(name); model.addAttribute("response", new DatasetResponse(ds)); return "Success"; } 

I want to write a test case that receives a dataset and then performs more actions based on its contents. But I am having problems getting data from the service. So far, my test case is:

 @Test public void testProducesXml() throws Exception { mockMvc.perform(get("/dataset.xml").param("name", "foo")) .andDo(print()) .andExpect(status().isOk()) .andExpect(model().attribute("Response", hasProperty("name", is("foo")))) .andExpect(xpath("/dataset/name").string("foo")); } 

The line model().attribute passes, but the test fails with xpath using:

org.xml.sax.SAXParseException; lineNumber: 1; columnNumber: 1; Premature end of file.

Ultimately, I would like to get a copy of the DatasetResponse in my test function so that I can do other things with it. I tried using andReturn() , but this fails for the same reason that xpath not working.

It turns out that although there is a DatasetResponse in the model, the response body is empty:

 ModelAndView: View name = Success View = null Attribute = Response value = org.vpac.web.model.response.DatasetResponse@457fdd58 errors = [] MockHttpServletResponse: Status = 200 Error message = null Headers = {} Content type = null Body = 

However, if I run the application in Tomcat and go to /dataset.xml?name=foo in my browser, I can see the data as XML.

So why is the body empty and how can I get a link to the DatasetResponse ? Edit Do I need to run a view to render a model or something else?

Answer 1

This led to a misconfiguration of the test: my MVC configuration was split into two files, as indicated in my web.xml :

 <context-param> <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name> <param-value> /WEB-INF/mvc-dispatcher-servlet.xml /WEB-INF/applicationContext.xml </param-value> </context-param> 

But, following the examples below, I only had a test class annotated with:

 @RunWith(SpringJUnit4ClassRunner.class) @WebAppConfiguration @ContextConfiguration("file:src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/applicationContext.xml") @Transactional public class DatasetTest { ... 

Adding the missing mvc-dispatcher-servlet.xml fixes the problem:

 @RunWith(SpringJUnit4ClassRunner.class) @WebAppConfiguration @ContextConfiguration({ "file:src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/mvc-dispatcher-servlet.xml", "file:src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/applicationContext.xml"}) @Transactional public class DatasetTest { ... 

Now ModelAndView contains objects that I return from the controller, and the response body is not empty. .andExpect(xpath works as expected, and I can get a copy of the response object with:

 mockMvc.perform(...).andReturn().getModelAndView().getModel().get("Response");