Testing a spring controller method having @ModelAttribute as parameter

Question

I am trying to test a controller with this method:

@RequestMapping(value="/test")
public ModelAndView generateRecords(@ModelAttribute("Employee") Employee employee) {

And I would like to know how can I create a unit testing for testing this. At the moment I am using:

MockHttpServletRequest request = new MockHttpServletRequest();
request.setRequestURI("/test");
//request.setMethod("GET");
new AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter().handle(request, 
        new MockHttpServletResponse(), this.controller);

Running this test result in NULL value for ModelAttribute (Employee)

Is there any way to pass modelattribute object to Controller when doing integration testing??

Thanks

---

Just to summarize:

Solution to this problem is pick the html element names and fill the paramter values in MockHttpRequest object and pass it over.

Example:

MockHttpServletRequest httpServletRequest = MockRequestResponseGenerator.mockRequest(getServletInstance().getServletContext(), "POST", "/test", paramters);

//These paramters must be part of the ModelAttribute Object. Make sure, you are using custom property binding in case you have different object.

        httpServletRequest.setParameter("name", "SPRING MVC INTEGRATION TEST 
TEMP");
        httpServletRequest.setParameter("id", "1");
        httpServletRequest.setParameter("desc", "SPRING MVC INTEGRATION TEST DESC");


        getServletInstance().service(httpServletRequest, httpServletResponse);

Tractate

Answer 1

You can set the values in the request as parameters following the OGNL paths matching the model attribute/form paths.

Sirmons

Good to hear... accept the answer if it helped solve your problem, so that other users will know... – Sirmons

how would you do if Employee had for instance a member "company" of type Company (which has, let's say, name and description fields)? how do you express the path to company.name and company.description? – Gessner