JUnit parameterized test with Spring autowiring AND transactions

I’ve been writing JUnit Parameterized tests (a nice intro here – also see Theories) to do some data driven API testing. Now, when introducing Spring into the mix there are a couple of extra things to do. I came unstuck though because I was trying to do Transactional tests – since I’m now using @RunWith(Parameterized.class) and setting up my Spring TestContextManager manually the @Transaction annotations caused an exception:

java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Superclass has no null constructors but no arguments were given

I couldn’t find any built in solution, so I’ve gone with manual transaction management in my test, using doInTransaction:

@RunWith(Parameterized.class)
@ContextConfiguration(locations = "classpath*:/testContext.xml")
public class MyTest {

    @Autowired
    PlatformTransactionManager transactionManager;

    private TestContextManager testContextManager;

    public MyTest (... parameters for test) {
        // store parameters in instance variables
    }

    @Before
    public void setUpSpringContext() throws Exception {
        testContextManager = new TestContextManager(getClass());
        testContextManager.prepareTestInstance(this);
    }

    @Parameterized.Parameters
    public static Collection generateData() throws Exception {
        ArrayList list = new ArrayList();
        // add data for each test here
        return list;
    }

    @Test
    public void validDataShouldLoadFully() throws Exception {
        new TransactionTemplate(transactionManager).execute(new TransactionCallback() {
            public Object doInTransaction(TransactionStatus status) {
                status.setRollbackOnly();
                try {
                    ... do cool stuff here

                } catch (Exception e) {
                    throw new RuntimeException(e);
                }
                return null;
            }
        });

    }

Tagged as: junit, spring, test, transaction