Spring Test Scope

A simple test scope for Spring.

Sometimes you have some stateful beans, eg. due to caching, that need to be recreated for every test. Using @DirtiesContext would throw the entire application context away, possibly slowing down test execution by a lot. This project introduces a test scope allows for only certain beans to be recreated while the rest of the application context can be reused.

Usage

Add the dependency

<dependency>
  <groupId>com.github.marschall</groupId>
  <artifactId>spring-test-scope</artifactId>
  <version>1.1.0</version>
  <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>

Define your beans as @TestScoped

@Bean
@TestScoped
public TestScopedBean testScopedBean() {
  return new TestScopedBean();
}

If you don't want to (re)define a bean you can instead use @TestScopedBeans on a test to redefine some beans as test scoped.

@SpringJUnitConfig
@TestScopedBeans("testScopedBean")
class MyTests {

  @Autowired
  private TestScopedBean testScopedBean;

Requirements

• The code has only been tested with Spring 5.3.
• Java 11 is required.
• The code has only been tested with JUnit 5, in theory JUnit 4 and TestNG should work as well

Caveats

The current implementation has some limitations:

• The presence of a ContextCustomizerFactory may prevent sharing of an application context across test classes.
• The test scope is opened in #prepareTestInstance and closed in #afterTestExecution. Before and after these methods in the same thread there is not test scope available and accessing test scoped beans will result in an exception. This works fine if a bean is injected into a test but may fail if:
  • a test scoped bean is referenced by an other bean in the application context
  • test instances are reused but injection is not repeated