Thursday, May 08, 2008

Logging for tests using the Spring Framework

It's been a while since I've posted to the blog 'cause I've been so busy, and it seems fitting that this be a good way to resume posting, as this issue has pissed me off quite a bit and been a major thorn in my side for the longest time.


The Spring Framework has some pretty good support for creating test classes for your application, however it by default does not properly initialize log4j logging when doing tests, and I found out today why. When running your application in a Servlet container, you'd configure Spring logging in web.xml. However, when running in a standalone context, Spring has no way of knowing how you want logging configured, so it leaves it up to log4j to configure itself. On that front, you have to realize what log4j's default configuration strategy is : reading a 'log4j.properties' file from the root of the classpath. Once this hits you (and it took me a while), getting logging running for your test cases becomes a simple matter of placing a valid 'log4j.properties' config file in the root of your test classpath, and logging starts working properly, so now you can read those pesky hibernate generated queries off your test log .

No comments: