Testing plugins with Ivy using Powermock

Recently, liferay-plugins SDK (and also its EE version) switched to using Ivy to manage some of the dependencies. Even when there are still static dependencies taken from defined portal -- Ivy dependencies are added to the lib/ext and ROOT/WEB-INF/lib ones, see build-common.xml -- this makes adding dependencies into plugins so much easier and cleaner.

Since I'm working on some plugins, I wanted to cover the functionality properly using JUnit tests, using  Powermock and Mockito. Here are necessary steps to get those libraries on test classpath in plugins SDK:

(1) open ./ivy.xml
(2) add following dependencies:

...
<dependency conf="runtime" name="xml-apis" org="xml-apis" rev="1.4.01" />
<dependency conf="test" name="junit" org="junit" rev="4.11" />
<!-- CUSTOM BEGIN -->
<dependency conf="test" name="mockito-all" org="org.mockito" rev="1.9.5" />
<dependency conf="test" name="powermock-api-mockito" org="org.powermock" rev="1.5" />
<dependency conf="test" name="powermock-api-support" org="org.powermock" rev="1.5" />
<dependency conf="test" name="powermock-core" org="org.powermock" rev="1.5" />
<dependency conf="test" name="powermock-reflect" org="org.powermock" rev="1.5" />
<dependency conf="test" name="powermock-module-junit4" org="org.powermock" rev="1.5" />
<dependency conf="test" name="powermock-module-junit4-common" org="org.powermock" rev="1.5" />
<dependency conf="test" name="javassist" org="javassist" rev="3.12.1.GA"/>
<!-- CUSTOM END -->
...

I'm sure there may be more combinations of dependencies, this is the first that fully worked for my basic tests using classes and calls like @PrepareForTest, @RunWith(PowerMockRunner.class), PowerMockito.mock(...) and Mockito.*.

Creating unit tests in core Liferay sources

Liferay has been catching up lately on the tests coverage. Many improvements have been made in the trunk located in liferay-portal / master branch on GitHub and since I've been fixing some things recently, I've included unit test for the changed class as well.

Quick start how-to:

1. read Liferay testing documentation to get the basic picture,
2. create your unit test in portal-impl/test/unit/.../<your_class>Test.java,
3. create test methods as usual with JUnit 4.x,
4. run the test and see results:

• cd portal-impl,
• ant test-class -Dclass=CustomJspRegistryImplTest,
• note that only the name of the class is used, not the full name including package.

Testing just a single class at a time seems to be necessary, executing ant test-unit to run all existing unit tests seems to be time consuming (from minutes to tens of minutes).