Reuse spring application context across junit test classes

by

Yes, this is perfectly possible. All you have to do is to use the same locations attribute in your test classes:

@ContextConfiguration(locations = "classpath:test-context.xml")

Spring caches application contexts by locations attribute so if the same locations appears for the second time, Spring uses the same context rather than creating a new one.

I wrote an article about this feature: Speeding up Spring integration tests. Also it is described in details in Spring documentation: 9.3.2.1 Context management and caching.

This has an interesting implication. Because Spring does not know when JUnit is done, it caches all context forever and closes them using JVM shutdown hook. This behavior (especially when you have a lot of test classes with different locations) might lead to excessive memory usage, memory leaks, etc. Another advantage of caching context.

More Related Contents:

  1. Disable @EnableScheduling on Spring Tests
  2. Injecting Mockito mocks into a Spring bean
  3. Spring Test & Security: How to mock authentication?
  4. How to in-memory unit test Spring-Jersey
  5. How to test a spring controller method by using MockMvc?
  6. request scoped beans in spring testing
  7. Rollback transaction after @Test
  8. How to test a mocked JNDI datasource with Spring?
  9. Another unnamed CacheManager already exists in the same VM (ehCache 2.5)
  10. java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: A ServletContext is required to configure default servlet handling
  11. spring junit load application context for tests
  12. Getting Spring Error “Bean named ‘x’ must be of type [y], but was actually of type [$Proxy]” in Jenkins
  13. NoSuchFieldError when trying to run a jUnit test with Spring
  14. Failed to load ApplicationContext caused by ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException in ClassReader
  15. @SpringBootTest vs @ContextConfiguration vs @Import in Spring Boot Unit Test
  16. Spring Data and Native Query with pagination
  17. File Upload with Angular2 to REST API
  18. Spring 4.2.3 and fasterxml Jackson 2.7.0 are incompatible
  19. Disabling SSL Certificate Validation in Spring RestTemplate
  20. Bean injection inside a JPA @Entity
  21. Prevent Spring Boot from registering a servlet filter
  22. How to use OrderBy with findAll in Spring Data
  23. spring – hibernate 5 naming strategy configuration
  24. How can I override Spring Boot application.properties programmatically?
  25. Neither BindingResult nor plain target object for bean name available as request attr [duplicate]
  26. Spring Boot Inherit application.properties from dependency
  27. How to use with an tag?
  28. How to generate a dynamic “in (…)” sql list through Spring JdbcTemplate?
  29. Performance impact of using aop
  30. How to allow a User only access their own data in Spring Boot / Spring Security?

Leave a Comment