How to Setup web application context in Spring MVC test

Question

We have a clear abstraction between Service layers & view layers context configurations and we are loading them as shown below.

Root application context:

<listener>
    <listener-class>org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener</listener-class>
</listener>

<context-param>
    <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
    <param-value>classpath*:META-INF/spring/applicationContext*.xml</param-value>
</context-param>

Web application context:

<servlet>
    <servlet-name>lovemytasks</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>
    <init-param>
        <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
        <param-value>/WEB-INF/spring/mmapp-servlet.xml</param-value>
    </init-param>
    <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>

Now we are trying to introduce SPRING MVC TEST FRAMEWORK to test our application.

For this i would need to setup the same environment as my real web application works.

How can i do that ?

I tried below configuration on my test to load both the contexts.

@ContextConfiguration(locations = { "classpath*:META-INF/spring/applicationContext*.xml",
    "file:src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/spring/mmapp-servlet.xml" })

But its erroring out saying

Caused by: org.springframework.beans.factory.parsing.BeanDefinitionParsingException: Configuration problem: Duplicate <global-method-security> detected. 

We have defined global security in both root application context and web application context.

Note: The above said issue will not appear when i run my web application. It happens only when i run Spring MVc test

I tried removing my global security and one place and then landing into errors with conversion services on running my tests. Which warned me that I am not loading the context as teh real Spring application does.

Now, i would like to setup my Spring MVC test environment to use or work as the same way my spring web application environment works. Can any one please suggest how can i achieve it ?

Answer 1

Use the @ContextHierarchy annotation. Its javadoc describes it well. In your case you would use

@WebAppConfiguration
@ContextHierarchy({
    @ContextConfiguration(locations = { "classpath*:/META-INF/spring/applicationContext-*.xml" }),
    @ContextConfiguration(locations = { "file:src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/spring/mmapp-servlet.xml" })
})