Why is SpringSecurityUtils null in this Grails unit test?

Question

In Grails 2.0.4, I'm trying to write a controller unit test which invokes the static SpringSecurityUtils.reauthenticate. The test returns a NullPointerException on that invocation. In a debugger, I can see that none of the Groovy dynamic properties (declaredMethods,etc.) of SpringSecurityUtils are populated.

I do note that when running the tests, the "Configuring Spring Security Core" log message is emitted after the unit-test failure. Here is a sample test:

class ReproTest {
    void testSpringSecurityUtils() {
        String.valueOf(true) // OK: a public final class from the JDK
        URLUtils.isRelativeURL("foo")  // OK: a class from another plugin
        SpringSecurityUtils.reauthenticate "user", "pw" // fails, NPE
    }
}

My initial reaction is that maybe plugins aren't accessible during unit tests, but if so, why is the URLUtils call working? And why does the test get "far enough" to initialize the plugin, but after the tests have completed?

Answer 1

For a unit test the container isn't starting up. No Spring injection or "grails goodness" is happening. You see in the logs that the plugin is initializing after the unit tests run, because it [container] does start for the integration tests. If you want to test the SpringSecurityUtils, although guessing it is already tested properly in the plugin, you would want to write an integration test.