@ContextConfiguration defaults

Spring @ContextConfiguration is a way to specify the Application Context for a test.

The location of a xml based test application context can be specified using the locations attribute:

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1	@ContextConfiguration(locations={"test-context.xml"})

and if @Configuration is used as the context, then a classes attibute can be specified:

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1	@ContextConfiguration(classes={TestConfiguration.class})

There are intelligent defaults for these attributes though and that is what I wanted to highlight in this post.

If the locations or the classes attribute is not specified, the default behavior is to first look for a xml configuration with a name as the test class name - "context.xml" file

For eg. if I have a Test class this way:

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@RunWith(SpringJUnit4ClassRunner.class) @ContextConfiguration public class TestSpringCache {

The location of the configuration that will be tried first is "TestSpringCache-context.xml"

If a context is not found at this location, then a @Configuration default is looked for by scanning all static inner classes annotated with @Configuration of the test class. So if I had the following:

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@RunWith(SpringJUnit4ClassRunner.class) @ContextConfiguration public class TestSpringCache {    ...     @Configuration  @EnableCaching  @ComponentScan("org.bk.samples.cache")  public static class TestConfiguration{  ..

the inner class TestConfiguration would be used as the source of the Application context.

The default behaviour can be changed by supplying a loader attribute to the @ContextConfiguration, say for eg, if I want to default to @Configuration with its defaults, it can done this way:

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@RunWith(SpringJUnit4ClassRunner.class) @ContextConfiguration(loader=AnnotationConfigContextLoader.class) public class TestSpringCache { ..

So to conclude, the defaults provided by @Configuration are a great way to make the tests a little more concise!