Spring Boot Test: Writing Unit Tests for the Controller Layers with @WebMvcTest

 

Unit Tests and Integration Tests

@SpringBootTest annotation will load the fully ApplicationContext. Therefore it is highly used for writing the integration testing in web server environment. This will not use slicing and scan for all the stereotype annotations (@Component, @Service, @Respository and @Controller / @RestController) and loads the full application context. Therefore this is more good at in the context of writing integration testing for the application.

@WebMvcTest annotation will load only the controller layer of the application. This will scan only the @Controller/ @RestController annotation and will not load the fully ApplicationContext. If there is any dependency in the controller layer (has some dependency to other beans from your service layer), you need to provide them manually by mocking those objects.

Therefore @SpringBootTest is widely used for Integration Testing purpose and @WebMvcTest is used for controller layer Unit testing.

Swagger for documenting your Spring Boot REST Api

 

What Is Swagger?

Swagger is a set of open-source tools built around the OpenAPI Specification that can help you design, build, document and consume REST APIs.

Swagger  is mostly used as an open source project for describing and documenting RESTful APIs.  Swagger-UI an another tool which provides the capability of displaying the REST Api documentation in the browser.  Besides rendering documentation, Swagger UI allows other API developers or consumers to interact with the API’s resources without having any of the implementation logic in place.

The more details can be found through following documentations.

https://swagger.io/docs/ 

http://springfox.github.io/springfox/docs/current/

 

Springfox for Swagger

The Swagger 2 specification, which is known as OpenAPI specification has several implementations. Currently, Springfox that has replaced Swagger-SpringMVC (Swagger 1.2 and older) is popular for Spring Boot applications.