Writing unittests for AEM (part 3): Mocking resources

I introduced SlingMocks in the recent blog posts (part 1, part 2), and till now we only covered some basics. Let’s dig deeper now and use one of its coolest features: Mocking resources.

Well, to be honest, we don’t mock resources. We do something much better: We build an in-memory structure which represent sling resources. We can even map that to an in-memory JCR-repository!

For this blog post I created a very simple Sling model, which supposed to build a classic navigation. For simplicity I omitted nearly all of the logic which makes up a production-ready navigation component, and want to add just the pages below the site root to it.

The relevant files in my github repo:

• The sling model
• The unit test
• Test data

The interesting part is the unit test. This time I used the AemMocks library from wcm.io, because it provides all the magic of the SlingMocks, plus some AEM specific objects I would like to use. As the AemContext class inherits directly from the SlingContext class, we can just use it as a drop-in replacement.

The setup method is very simple: It loads a JSON structure and populates a in-memory resource tree with it (adds everything below a resource “/content”). Using this approach there’s no longer the need to mock resources, properties/value maps, and mock the relation between these. This is all done by the SlingMocks/AemMocks framework.

Thus a testcase looks like this:

This simple example shows how easy it can be to write unit tests. The test code is very concise and easy to read and understand. In my opinion the biggest issue when writing unit tests now is creating the test content 🙂

Some notes to the test content:

• My personal style is to put the test content into the same structure than the java packages. This makes it very easy to find the testcontent and keeps the testcontent and the unittest together.
• You can write the JSON manually. But you can also use CRXDE Lite to create some structure in your local AEM instance and then export it with “http://localhost:4502/content/myproject/testcontent.tidy.-1.json ” and paste it into the JSON file. I find this way much more convenient, especially if you already have most of the test content ready. But if you do that, please clean up the unnecessary properties in the test data. They are polluting the test content and make it harder to understand.