Testing

Testing

Testing is a crucial activity in any piece of software development or integration. Typically Camel Riders use various different technologies wired together in a variety of patterns with different expression languages together with different forms of Bean Integration and Dependency Injection so its very easy for things to go wrong! . Testing is the crucial weapon to ensure that things work as you would expect.

Camel is a Java library so you can easily wire up tests in whatever unit testing framework you use (JUnit 3.x, 4.x or TestNG). However the Camel project has tried to make the testing of Camel as easy and powerful as possible so we have introduced the following features.

Testing mechanisms

The following mechanisms are supported

In all approaches the test classes look pretty much the same in that they all reuse the Camel binding and injection annotations.

Camel Test Example

Here is the Camel Test example.

Notice how it derives from the Camel helper class CamelTestSupport but has no Spring or Guice dependency injection configuration but instead overrides the createRouteBuilder() method.

Spring Test with XML Config Example

Here is the Spring Testing example using XML Config.

Notice that we use @DirtiesContext on the test methods to force Spring Testing to automatically reload the CamelContext after each test method - this ensures that the tests don't clash with each other (e.g. one test method sending to an endpoint that is then reused in another test method).

Also notice the use of @ContextConfiguration to indicate that by default we should look for the FilterTest-context.xml on the classpath to configure the test case which looks like this

Spring Test with Java Config Example

Here is the Spring Testing example using Java Config. For more information see Spring Java Config.

This is similar to the XML Config example above except that there is no XML file and instead the nested ContextConfig class does all of the configuration; so your entire test case is contained in a single Java class. We currently have to reference by class name this class in the @ContextConfiguration which is a bit ugly. Please vote for SJC-238 to address this and make Spring Test work more cleanly with Spring JavaConfig.

Its totally optional but for the ContextConfig implementation we derive from SingleRouteCamelConfiguration which is a helper Spring Java Config class which will configure the CamelContext for us and then register the RouteBuilder we create.

Blueprint Test

Here is the Blueprint Testing example using XML Config.

Also notice the use of getBlueprintDescriptors to indicate that by default we should look for the camelContext.xml in the package to configure the test case which looks like this

Testing endpoints

Camel provides a number of endpoints which can make testing easier.

The main endpoint is the Mock endpoint which allows expectations to be added to different endpoints; you can then run your tests and assert that your expectations are met at the end.

Stubbing out physical transport technologies

If you wish to test out a route but want to avoid actually using a real physical transport (for example to unit test a transformation route rather than performing a full integration test) then the following endpoints can be useful.

Testing existing routes

Camel provides some features to aid during testing of existing routes where you cannot or will not use Mock etc. For example you may have a production ready route which you want to test with some 3rd party API which sends messages into this route.