Spring WebClient is the reactive replacement for the legacy RestTemplate. It has a more modern fluent API and first class support for Reactive Streams. This means it supports non-blocking, asynchronous responses.
However, the reactive WebClient does not yet have the mature test support that RestTemplate now has. There is not yet a standard recipe to test Spring WebClient applications. No doubt support will be improved in future versions but for now, here’s what works for me.
A common unit test scenario for Spring / Spring MVC applications is to verify behavior when logged in as a particular user. The new spring-security-test library available with Spring Security version 4 makes testing user access controls in Spring and Spring MVC applications far simpler.
Unit tests have most value when they’re easy to read and understand. Unit tests typically follow a very straightforward pattern:
So long as this pattern is obvious in the test, the test is readable.
In my previous post regarding Spring-WS and Security I didn’t mention anything about testing the resulting SOAP service. Particularly when it comes to secure services, it’s vitally important to test. First, we want to make sure that the service is functionally correct – that it returns the correct results. Second, we want to make sure it is secure – that it refuses service to any request that does not meet our security requirements.
With regard to how we test, it’s simplest to use some SOAP editor tool that lets us fiddle with the request and press a button to retest instantly. But ideally we want some programmatic test that can be included in the test phase of our build.
This post describes testing the now legendary Spanners WS demo with the following requirements:
The updated source of the Spanners WS demo including the tests described here is available to download.