How to save entities along with their related entities in spring boot integration testing?

Question

I have an integration test on a endpoint of creating a user with its related entities. It turns out that the related entities were not persisted with the user entity.

However, it is working fine when running the normal spring boot application. Is it possible to achieve this during testing?

This is the log when running the integration test of the endpoint

And this is the log when calling from Postman to the normal application

as you can notice the roles are not inserted to the rel_mi_user__mi_user_role table during integration testing.

The setup source code for the integration test is shown below

@Autowired
private PasswordEncoder passwordEncoder;

@Autowired
private MockMvc mockMvc;

@Autowired
private MiMiUserRepository miMiUserRepository;

private static Logger log = LoggerFactory.getLogger(MiMiUserResourceIT.class);

@Test
@Transactional
void testRegisterBackOfficeUser() throws Exception {
    MiMiUserRegistrationDTO userRegistrationDTO = new MiMiUserRegistrationDTO();
    userRegistrationDTO.setPassword("test12345");
    userRegistrationDTO.setEmail("[email protected]");
    userRegistrationDTO.setContactNo("0188991122");
    userRegistrationDTO.setUserRoles(List.of("BACKOFFICE"));
    MiMiUserProfileRegistrationDTO profile = new MiMiUserProfileRegistrationDTO();
    profile.setSalutation("Mr");
    profile.setFirstName("John");
    profile.setLastName("Lee");
    userRegistrationDTO.setProfile(profile);

    mockMvc
        .perform(
            post("/v1/p/user/register/back-office")
                .contentType(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)
                .content(TestUtil.convertObjectToJsonBytes(userRegistrationDTO))
        )
        .andExpect(status().isCreated());
    MiUser u = miMiUserRepository.findOneWithMiUserRolesByEmailIgnoreCase(userRegistrationDTO.getEmail()).get();
    assertThat(u.getUserStatus()).isEqualTo(UserStatus.NEW);
}

Answer 1

I guess it has to do with the fact that your whole test is annotated with @Transactional. When you annotate your test method with @Transactional, everything that happens during that test happens within one single transaction. As you might know, changes are only flushed to the database at the end of a transaction unless you call the flush method manually which is generally discouraged unless you know what you are doing because you interfere with your JPA provider's flushing optimization.

Only when the changes are flushed to the DB, auto-generated properties like an ID is set on your entity and DB constraints are evaluated. Yes, you're reading it right, you might even violate a DB constraint within your test without the test failing! Here you can find more reasons why you should not annotate your tests with @Transactional.

If you need to save several entities in the arrange part of your test, you can autowire the Spring TransactionTemplate and create all your entities within a manual transaction. The same might apply to asserts where you load an entity from the DB and want to evaluate a lazy-loaded collection of said entity. As far as I can tell, neither of said scenarios apply to your test, just try omitting the @Transactional and your test should work.

Side note: if you write @DataJpaTests you always need to call the saveAndFlush method of the repository instead of the save method because @DataJpaTests are always transactional.