CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javaunit-testingjunitjsoup
vladfau
vladfau

Reputation: 1003

URL unit testing in Java

I'm writing tests for some data fetcher, which gets information from some URL and parses it with JSOUP.

One of the methods:

public Map<String, String> getDepartments() {
    Map<String, String> result = new HashMap<>();
    Document doc = null;

    try {
        doc = Jsoup.connect(globalScheduleURL).get();
    } catch (IOException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }

    Elements links = doc.select("a[href]");
...
}

where globalScheduleURL is a String, usually formatted as http://universitysite.edu/.... For testing purposes I made a mock copy of needed pages and saved it under ./src/test/resources. How can I access to local files, so the address starts with file:/?

When I tried to do something like this:

@Before
public void initializeDataFetcher() throws MalformedURLException {
    df = new SSUDataFetcher();

    File file = new File("./src/test/resources/departments.html");
    URL fileURL = file.toURI().toURL();

    System.out.println(fileURL);
    df.setGlobalURL(fileURL.toString());


}

I get:

file:.../src/test/resources/departments.html java.net.MalformedURLException: Only http & https protocols supported

Is there any workaround to avoid this exception in JSoup or some URL formatting in Java? `

Upvotes: 2

Views: 4385

Answers (3)

Daniel Robertson
Daniel Robertson

Reputation: 41

doc = Jsoup.connect(globalScheduleURL).get();

is not testable because connect() is a static method. To test this, you would need to first extract this line of code into it's own method 

Document getDocumentHelper(String globalScheduleURL) throws IOException {
        return Jsoup.connect(globalScheduleURL).get();
}

and then stub this method out to return a mock Document, using a mocking framework like Mockito, EasyMock, PowerMock, or Spock and use it in your original test. For example, in Spock: 

Document doc = mock(Document) 
classUnderTest.getDocumentHelper(globalScheduleURL) >> doc

Or Mockito: 

Document doc = mock(Document.class); 
when(classUnderTest.getDocumentHelper(globalScheduleURL)).thenReturn(doc);

Upvotes: 4

Smutje
Smutje

Reputation: 18183

I would prefer to factor the URL fetching out into an own class/method (because reading from an URL is no mission critical code) - the interesting part is the parsing of the HTML and this can be done easily by a method accepting the HTML-String and returning the parsed result without the actual URL reading and you easily can mock the method by providing it with a static String.

Upvotes: 2

Joni
Joni

Reputation: 111409

The real problem is that the program has not been written with testability in mind. Create an abstraction for the part that obtains the data, so that you can inject a mock implementation in the test.

Upvotes: 2

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