Grails and DBUnit Integration Testing

I need to do a bit of integration testing with Grails and both of the DBUnit plugins I found didn’t seem to be maintained.  To create a simple base class for DBUnit based integration tests turned out to be relatively simple to create.

For the purposes of this sample I created a grails project called bookstore with a single domain class called Book in the bookstore package.  This is what book domain class looks like:

package bookstore

class Book {
    String title
    String author
}

First I had to add the DBUnit dependency to /grails-app/conf/BuildConfig.groovy and also enable the maven central repository.  This is what the grails.project.dependency.resolution section now looks like:

grails.project.dependency.resolution = {
    inherits( "global" ) {
    }
    log "warn"
    repositories {        
        grailsPlugins()
        grailsHome()
        mavenCentral()
    }
    dependencies {
     test 'org.dbunit:dbunit:2.4.7'
    }
}

Next I created a base class for my DBUnit based tests.  I created a class named DbunitGroovyTestCase in /test/integration/bookstore.  The DataSource property named dataSource is injected from the Spring container when the integration tests are run, and I used the DatabaseDataSourceConnection class to create the DBUnit connection.

package bookstore

import javax.sql.DataSource;

import org.dbunit.database.DatabaseDataSourceConnection;
import org.dbunit.database.IDatabaseConnection;
import org.dbunit.dataset.xml.FlatXmlDataSetBuilder
import org.dbunit.dataset.xml.FlatXmlDataSet
import org.dbunit.dataset.IDataSet
import org.dbunit.operation.DatabaseOperation;

import groovy.util.GroovyTestCase;

class DbunitGroovyTestCase extends GroovyTestCase {

    DataSource dataSource
    IDatabaseConnection connection

    protected void setUp() {
        connection = new DatabaseDataSourceConnection(dataSource)
        DatabaseOperation.CLEAN_INSERT.execute(connection, dataSet)
    }

    protected void tearDown(){
        connection.close()
    }

    protected IDataSet getDataSet() {
        return new FlatXmlDataSetBuilder().build(new FileInputStream("test/dbunit/dataset.xml"));
    }

}

Here is a sample data set I created for the book table, located in test/dbunit/dataset.xml:

<dataset>
    <book id="1" version="1" author="Mark Twain" title="The Adventures of Tom Sawyer"/>
    <book id="2" version="1" author="Mark Twain" title="The Prince and the Pauper"/>
    <book id="3" version="1" author="Mark Twain" title="Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"/>
    <book id="4" version="1" author="Mark Twain" title="A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court"/>
</dataset>

Finally here is a sample integration test, located in test/integration/bookstore/BookPersistenceTest.groovy

package bookstore;

import grails.test.*

class BookPersistenceTest extends DbunitGroovyTestCase  {

    public void testFindAllByAuthor() throws Exception {
        def books = Book.findAllByAuthor("Mark Twain")
        assertEquals(4,books.size)
    }

    public void testFindByTitle() throws Exception {
        def book = Book.findByTitle("Adventures of Huckleberry Finn")
        assertEquals("Mark Twain",book.author)
    }

}