In the last parts of this small series (part 1, part 2, part 3) I covered some basic approaches how you can use the Sling and AEM mocking libraries to ease writing unittests. The examples were quite basic and focussed, but in reality many test cases turn out to be much more complex.

And especially when your code has dependencies to other OSGI services, tests can get tricky. So today I want to walk you through some unittest I wrote some time ago, it’s a unittest for the EnsureOakIndex functionality (EnsureOakIndexJobHandlerTest).

The interesting part is that the required EnsureOakIndex service references 4 other services in total; if they are not present, my EnsureOakIndex service will never start properly. Thus you have to fullfill all service requirements of an OSGI service in the unittest as well (at least if you want to use SlingContext like I do here).

The easiest way to solve this is to rely on predefined services which are part of the SlingMocks or AemMocks. The second best way is to create simple mocks and register them a service, so the dependency is fulfilled. That’s definitely a convenient way if your tests do not invoke any of the service methods at all.

Thus the setup() method of my unittests are often pretty large, because there I prepare and inject all other services which I need to make my software-under-test work.

And because this setup works quite well and reliably, I always use AemContext for my unittests (or SlingContext, but as I haven not yet observed any difference in test execution time, I often prefer just AemContext because it comes with some more sevices). Just if I don’t need resources, nodes and no OSGI, I stick with plain junit. For everything else AemContext removes the necessity for mocking a lot.

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.

In the previous post I showed you how easy it is to start using SlingContext. If you start to use this approach in your own project and just copy the code, your Maven build is likely to fail with messages like this:

[ERROR] testActivate_unconfiguredParams(de.joerghoh.cqdump.samples.unittest.ReplicationServletTest)  Time elapsed: 0.01 s  <<< ERROR!
org.apache.sling.testing.mock.osgi.NoScrMetadataException: No OSGi SCR metadata found for class de.joerghoh.cqdump.samples.unittest.ReplicationServlet
    at org.apache.sling.testing.mock.osgi.OsgiServiceUtil.injectServices(OsgiServiceUtil.java:381)

The problem here is not the use of the SlingMock library itself, but rather the fact that we use SlingMocks to test code which uses OSGI annotations. The fix itself is quite straight-forward: We need to create OSGI metadata also for the unittests and not only for the bundling (SlingMock is reading these metadata for the test execution).

That’s the reason why there’s the need to have a dedicated execution definition for the maven-bundle-plugin:

Also you need to instruct the maven-bundle-plugin to actually export the generated metadata to the filesystem using the “<exportScr> statements; this should be the default in my opinion, but you need to specify it explicitly. Also don’t forget to add the “_dsannotation” and “_metatypeannotations” statements to its instruction section:

And even then it will fail, if you don’t upgrade the maven-bundle-plugin to a version later than 4.0:

Ok, if you adapted your POMs in this way, your SlingMock based unittests for OSGI r6-based services should run fine. Now you can start exploring more features of SlingMocks.

Over the course of the last years the tooling for AEM development improved a lot. While some years ago there was hardly an IDE integration available, today we have dedicated tools for Eclipse and IntelliJ (https://helpx.adobe.com/experience-manager/6-4/sites/developing/using/aem-eclipse.html). Also packaging and validation support was poor, today we have the opensourced filevault and tools like oakpal (thanks Marc!)

But with SlingMocks we also have much better unittest tooling (thanks a lot to Stefan Seifert and the Sling people), so we much more and better/easier tooling than just Mockito and Powermock. SlingContext (and its extension AemContext) allows you create unit tests quite easily. Using them can help you get rid of mocking Sling Resources, repo access and many things more.

On top of that, SlingMock can easily work with the new OSGI r6 annotations, which allow you to define OSGI properties in Pojos. Mocking the @ObjectClassDefinition classes isn’t that easy, because they are essentially annotations …

To illustrate that, I have created a minimal demo with a servlet and testcases for it (source code at Github). Basically the functionality of the class itself is not relevant for this article, but we want to focus on aspects how you utilize the frameworks best to avoid boilerplate code.

The code is quite simple, but to make unittesting a bit more challenging, it uses the new OSGI r6 annotations for OSGI configuration (using the @Designate and the @ObjectClassDefinition annotations) plus a referenced service.

If you try to mock the ReplicationServlet.Config class the naive way, you will find out, that it’s an annotation, which is referenced in the activate() method. I always failed to mock it somehow, so I switched gear and started to use SlingMock for it. (I don’t want to say that it is not possible, but it’s definitly not straight-foward, and in my opinion writing unit-tests should be straight forward, otherwise they are not created at all.)

With SlingMocks the approach changes. I am not required to create mocks, but SlingMocks provides a mocked OSGI runtime we can use. That means, that we create the OSGI parameters as a map to tell the SlingContext object to register our service with these parameters (line 59).

Because SlingContext implements quite a bit of the OSGI semantics, it also requires that all referenced services are available (if these are static references). Therefor I use Mockito to mock the Replicator and I register the mock to provide the Replicator service. In realworld I could verify the interactions of my servlet with that mock.

This basic example illustrates how you can use SlingMocks to avoid a lot of mocking and stubbing. This example does not utilize the full power of SlingMocks yet, we are just scratching at the surface. But we already have some benefit : If you switch from SCR annotations to OSGI annotations, your SlingMock unittests don’t need any change, because it provides an OSGI-like environment, and there the way how metatypes are generated and injected are abstracted away.