Spring Cookbook

Unit testing controller methods

Unit testing the logic of controller methods is usually difficult, but Spring makes it easy by providing methods to simulate a request and test the response generated by Spring.

Getting ready

We'll test this controller method which concatenates two parameters and passes the result to the concat.jsp JSP file:

@RequestMapping("concat")
public String concat(@RequestParam String a, @RequestParam String b, Model model) {
  String result = a + b;
  model.addAttribute("result", result);
  return "concat";
}

How to do it…

To test a controller method, build and execute an HTTP request and then perform tests on the response returned by the controller method. We will test that for a given set of parameters, the correct attribute is passed ...