How to inject a Mock in a Spring Context

I have a test that is using some Spring contexts. In these contexts, a number of beans are declared.
I want the test to use the actual implementation of the beans of the contexts, EXCEPT for one of them, for which I want to use a MOCK.

I tried to make the Test a Configuration component (with @Configuration annotation), but the XML seems to take priority over the @Bean annotation, so it doesn't work, this way:



@RunWith(SpringJUnit4ClassRunner.class)
@ContextConfiguration(locations = {"context1.xml", "context2.xml", ...})
@Configuration
public class MyTest{

@Inject
private MyTargetBean target;

private AnotherBean myMock = mock(AnotherBean.class);

@Bean
public AnotherBean myMock() { return myMock; }

.....


I know that i can define the Mocks in XML, but for that I would need an extra XML file for each test in which I wish to do this. I want to avoid this complexity.

Is there a way to inject a bean (like a mock) in a context apart than through XML?

Thank you!

It is indeed a duplicate of

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The Springockito-annotation is exactly what I was looking for

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Yes, you are on the right track, putting a mock `@Bean` in a `@Configuration` class is one approach, and I'll describe my experience:

The trick is that you need to use a different set of .xml files purely for testing which exclude the live versions of those beans.

@ContextConfiguration(locations = {"context1-test.xml", "context2-test.xml", ...})

And the "-test-xml" files go in `src/test/resources`.

At least that was my experience in doing the same thing. Maybe there is some way to "override" the beans with the mock versions, but as yet I am not aware of it.

I also chose to put the mocks (I had 5 of them) all together in an own configuration:

@Configuration
public class MockServicesProvider {
@Bean
public AnotherBean myMock() { return mock(AnotherBean.class); }
}

Another interesting part of this problem is the common usage of `initMocks(this);` in the `@Before` method of your test class.

If the mocks are being used in other places (and they are, that's why you are wiring them up...) then `initMocks(this)` will blow them away between tests (not literally - just that new mocks will be created and any other mocks wired up in other objects will be "lost").

The solution to this was to call mockito's `reset(mockObject)` in the `@Before` method before each test. The same mocks are reset (all the `when`'s and interactions), without creating new mocks.

Note that the Mockito docs for `reset` say very sternly that this method should not commonly be used, except in the context of mocks being applied via dependency injection, as we are indeed doing in this case :)

Have fun!