Testing transactions...

[Eric Nielsen]

I've been trying to track down some Hibernate/JPA behavior by getting a simple test case. The regular application using OpenEntityMangerInView, and @Transactional annotations on the dao (migrating to a repository pattern).

Most of my tests are true unit tests and hit mocks of the various daos/repositories. I also have a very thin layer of integration tests that test that the dao layer works; so far these test have been very simple and didn't need to worry about transaction semantics.

Now I have a test that is triggering lazy load exceptions, and I'm not sure what's needed in the test environment to get lazy loading to behave in a similar manner as the application.

Here's my test code:

    public void testEventDeletion() {
    Competition comp = service.findById(1L);
    int numEvents = comp.getEvents().size();
    assertTrue("Must have non-zero events", numEvents>0);
    Event event = comp.getEvents().get(0);
    comp.removeEvent(event);
    service.makePersistent(comp);
    int updatedCount = comp.getEvents().size();
    assertEquals("Event should have been removed",updatedCount,numEvents-1);
    assertTrue("Event should not be in the event list",!comp.getEvents().contains(event));
    }

The first getEvents().size() call is where the exception is getting thrown.

Now the dao is very simple (most of it comes from a base class)

@Transactional
public class CompetitionDAOHibernate extends GenericHibernateDAO<Competition, Long> implements CompetitionDAO {
@PersistenceContext
public void setEntityManager(final EntityManager em) {
super.setEntityManager(em);
}

}

The integration tests use a different Spring application context file, but both have identical transaction manager setups.

I beleive the only real difference between my integration test environment and either my full acceptance test environment or production is the OEMIV filter.

How do you establish/deal with transactions in test environments when using Spring annotations to drive transactions in application code?