Unit-Testing EJB 3.1 with Netbeans, Maven and embedded Glassfish

When trying out unit-testing support in Netbeans 7.0 with the EJB 3.1 embedded container from glassfish 3.1 I ran across a few problems for which I want to share my solutions. I'm working through chapter 6 of "Beginning Java EE 6 with GlassFish 3" at the moment. It's a good book but the code examples are not quite complete in some cases.

I'm in an Maven EJB Module-Project in Netbeans using:

• Netbeans 7.0
• GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 3.1 (43)
• maven 3.0.3 (bundled)

The module is just a scaffold consisting of:

• A JPA entity bean (provider: Eclipselink 2.0.2, jdbc: Derby 10.6.2.1 client)
• An EJB implementing CRUD on this bean
• A remote interface for the EJB
• A web service

My goal is to test the EJB with the EJB 3.1 embedded container

EJBContainer.createEJBContainer()


First of all, when you generate an unit test for the EJB in Netbeans and use the provided quick fix for missing EJBContainer, it modifies the pom.xml to use the so-called Glassfish static shell for the embedded container.

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.glassfish.extras</groupId>
  <artifactId>glassfish-embedded-static-shell</artifactId>
  <version>3.1</version>
  <scope>system</scope>
  <systemPath>${glassfish.embedded-static-shell.jar}</systemPath>
</dependency>


It then sets the property ${glassfish.embedded-static-shell.jar} to a Glassfish installation of your choice, for example the bundled one. The jar file contains nothing but classpath entries for the jars needed for Glassfish embedded. This is suboptimal, as the build is now dependent on a local installation in the right version, and is not portable due to the hard-code path in the property. When using Hudson or similar CI, having to have a Glassfish installation on your build server is sometimes not preferable.

Alternatively, you can specify to download an embedded glassfish installation with the following pom.xml snippet:

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.glassfish.extras</groupId>
  <artifactId>glassfish-embedded-all</artifactId>
  <version>3.1</version>
  <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>


Warning: This is a big download, around 70 MB.

It works out of the box for simple EJB, but I still had a few issues in my case:

1. As soon as you put a remote interface in your bean, the embedded glassfish container starts a CORBA IIOP listener on default port 3700, resulting in a BindException: Address already in use if there is another instance of glassfish running
2. As soon as you put a JAX-WS web service in your bean, the embedded container throws a java.lang.NullPointerException at java.util.PropertyResourceBundle.handleGetObject(PropertyResourceBundle.java:136)
3. The embedded container can't find your JTA jdbc resources referenced in persistence.xml. I also wanted to use a different persistence.xml using an embedded Derby database and using drop-and-create for eclipselink.ddl-generation

To solve issue 1, I needed to use a different domain.xml than the default one for the embedded container to change the port numbers. Pointing the embedded container to a different domain.xml by putting the property org.glassfish.ejb.embedded.glassfish.configuration.file in a map and passing it to EJBContainer.createEJBContainer() as indicated by the Oracle GlassFish Server 3.1 Embedded Server Guide didn't work for me. Instead i had to use the org.glassfish.ejb.embedded.glassfish.instance.root, and point it to a glassfish domain directory. I have created it under src/test/resources/testing-domain. The following files are needed:

• config/admin-keyfile
• config/cacerts.jks
• config/domain.xml
• config/keyfile
• config/keystore.jks
• config/login.conf
• config/server.policy

I pulled the files from the glassfish-embedded-all-3.1.jar and changed to domain.xml to use different port. I also activated the http and https listeners (putting them on ports 28080 and 28181, respectiveley).

To solve issue 2, I had to put the property org.glassfish.ejb.embedded.glassfish.web.http.port when calling EJBContainer.createEJBContainer(props);
The name of the property is a bit misleading, as the value is ignored completely and can be an empty String. It just means that the embedded glassfish instance should start the http listeners (just putting them as enabled="true" in domain.xml wasn't enough).

To solve issue 3, I created an additional persistence.xml and put it to src/test/resources/META-INF:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<persistence version="2.0" xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence/persistence_2_0.xsd">
  <persistence-unit name="bookstore-ejb" transaction-type="JTA">
    <provider>org.eclipse.persistence.jpa.PersistenceProvider</provider>
    <exclude-unlisted-classes>false</exclude-unlisted-classes>
    <properties>
      <property
        name="eclipselink.target-database"
        value="DERBY" />
      <property
        name="eclipselink.ddl-generation"
        value="drop-and-create-tables" />
      <property
        name="eclipselink.logging.level"
        value="FINE" />
      <property
        name="javax.persistence.jdbc.driver"
        value="org.apache.derby.jdbc.EmbeddedDriver" />
      <property
        name="javax.persistence.jdbc.url"
        value="jdbc:derby:memory:bookstore-ejb;create=true;" />
      <property
        name="javax.persistence.jdbc.user"
        value="APP" />
      <property
        name="javax.persistence.jdbc.password"
        value="APP" />
    </properties>
  </persistence-unit>
</persistence>


Next, I copy target/classes to target/embedded-classes and afterwards copy target/test-classes to target/embedded-classes to overwrite my production META-INF/persistence.xml with the maven-resources-plugin:

<plugin>
    <artifactId>maven-resources-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.5</version>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <id>copy-classes-to-embedded</id>
            <phase>compile</phase>
            <goals>
                <goal>copy-resources</goal>
            </goals>
            <configuration>
                <outputDirectory>target/embedded-classes</outputDirectory>
                <overwrite>true</overwrite>
                <resources>
                    <resource>
                        <directory>target/classes</directory>
                    </resource>
                    <resource>
                        <directory>src/test/resources</directory>
                    </resource>
                </resources>
            </configuration>
        </execution>

    </executions>
</plugin>

</plugins>


Then, I point the EJBContainer.MODULES property to target/embedded-classes.

We can now write our unit-test like this:

public class BookEJBTest {

    private static EJBContainer ec=null;
    private static Context ctx=null;

    public BookEJBTest() {
    }

    @BeforeClass
    public static void initContainer() throws Exception {
        Map<String, Object> props=new HashMap<String, Object>();
        props.put(EJBContainer.MODULES, new File("target/embedded-classes"));
        props.put("org.glassfish.ejb.embedded.glassfish.instance.root","./src/test/testing-domain");
        props.put("org.glassfish.ejb.embedded.glassfish.web.http.port","");
        ec = EJBContainer.createEJBContainer(props);
        ctx = ec.getContext();
    }


    @AfterClass
    public static void closeContainer() throws Exception {
        if(ctx!=null)
            ctx.close();
        if(ec!=null)
            ec.close();
    }

    @Test
    public void shouldCreateABook() throws Exception {

        Book book = new Book();
        book.setTitle("The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy");
        book.setPrice(12.5F);
        book.setDescription("Scifi book created by Douglas Adams");
        book.setIsbn("1-84023-742-2");
        book.setNbOfPages(354);
        book.setIllustrations(false);

        BookEJB bookEJB = (BookEJB) ctx.lookup("java:global/embedded-classes/BookEJB!de.familienservice.bookstoreejb.BookEJB");

        book = bookEJB.createBook(book);
        assertNotNull("ID should not be null", book.getId());
    }

}


The test runs with mvn test as well as with the embedded test runner in Netbeans 7.0. The build is portable und should run in my Hudson now.
Note that I didn't create a test for the webservice yet. The URL the webservice binds to is always http://localhost:28080/... though, so this should be an easy task.

FYR, I have put up the code for this project on github.

If you have any questions or tips for me, feel free to comment :-)

Edit: You have to have the glassfish maven repository in addition to the eclipselink repository in your pom.xml

   <repositories>  
     <repository>  
       <url>http://ftp.ing.umu.se/mirror/eclipse/rt/eclipselink/maven.repo</url>  
       <id>eclipselink</id>  
       <layout>default</layout>  
       <name>Repository for library Library[eclipselink]</name>  
     </repository>  
     <repository>  
       <id>glassfish-repo</id>  
       <url>http://download.java.net/maven/glassfish/</url>  
       <name>Repository for glassfish artifacts</name>  
     </repository>  
   </repositories>