Testing annotated field validation (@Valid) - Spring MVC

[Norm Chan]

Hi Johan,

I am creating JUNIT tests for my Spring MVC REST API controllers as per
http://www.jayway.com/2014/01/14/unit-testing-spring-mvc-controllers-with-rest-assured/
 
Everything is working well for us except for testing field validations for controllers that use the @Valid annotation.

This may likely be related to the more general Spring MVC testing issue found at this stackoverflow posting.  We are experience the same end behaviour.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12308213/how-do-i-get-spring-mvc-to-invoke-validation-in-a-junit-test

Here's snippets of the code in question:
 
a)      Controller Snippet:

public RestResponseObject handleCreate(HttpServletRequest request, @PathVariable(value = "loginId") String loginId, @Valid @RequestBody CreateUser createUser) {
 
b)      POJO/Data Bean Snippet:

public class CreateUser {
…

    @Size(min = 8, max = 20)
    private String userPassword;
…

c)       Test Snippet

We first create a createUser with invalid field(s) - in this case, a password that is too short.

import static com.jayway.restassured.module.mockmvc.RestAssuredMockMvc.*;
import static org.hamcrest.Matchers.equalTo;
import static org.hamcrest.Matchers.hasItems;

....

@Test
@Override
public void testCreateFieldValidation() {
 
...
given().
                standaloneSetup(new UserController()).contentType(ContentType.JSON).
                body(createUser).
                when().
                post("/user/" + loginId).

then().
                statusCode(HttpStatus.BAD_REQUEST.value()).etc ….
...
 
What happens is that the controller never gets invoked (nor does the interceptor that handles the expected MethodArgumentNotValidException). 
The result is the following:
 
java.lang.IllegalStateException: Expected response body to be verified as JSON, HTML or XML but content-type 'null' is not supported out of the box.

Try registering a custom parser using:

   RestAssured.registerParser("null", <parser type>);

[Johan Haleby]

I'm not entirely sure to be honest. When unit test spring mvc controllers things such as filters, specific servlet setups and authentication (afaik) will not be handled automatically. It may be the case that hibernate validation is not applied in your unit tests. You may need to apply it to the "standaloneSetup" if you which this to work but as I said I'm not sure if this is the case. This is the drawback of using spring mvc testing and that's why I usually use a combination of the real REST Assured API and REST Assured MockMvc when testing spring services.

/Johan

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