Making Progress

In my last post, I lamented how difficult it is to unit test the Persistence layer.  My problem revolves around creation of a valid EntityManager.  Today, I revisited Joerg Gross' DevBlog entry "JPA Unit test setup with NetBeans". This time, I worked through each step of his sample code and managed to get my test case to compile and successfully instantiate an EntityManager.

But what was even more useful, was that the failures in instantiating the EntityManager clearly identified several issues with my Entity classes.  Now that I've finally got the EntityManager working, I can move on to actually building test cases.  Stay tuned.

In my implementation, I did two things differently from Mr. Gross.  First, I don't have a web tier, so the reference to /WEB-INF/classes/ in the build file isn't relevant.  Also, I didn't create an orm.xml file. 

Here is the code as I implemented it:

In the Test class:

  @BeforeClass
  public static void setUpClass() {
    /* Code adapted from
     *  Author: Joerg Gross
     *  Title: DevBlog "JPA Unit test setup with NetBeans"
     *  URL: http://eercp.blogspot.com/2011/12/ide-setup-with-netbeans.html
     */
    Properties props = new Properties();
    props.put("javax.persistence.transactionType", "RESOURCE_LOCAL");
    props.put("javax.persistence.jtaDataSource", "");
    props.put("javax.persistence.nonJtaDataSource", "");
    props.put("eclipselink.jdbc.driver", "org.apache.derby.jdbc.EmbeddedDriver");
    props.put("eclipselink.jdbc.url", "jdbc:derby:testDB;create=true");
    props.put("eclipselink.jdbc.user", "");
    props.put("eclipselink.jdbc.password", "");
    props.put("eclipselink.ddl-generation", "drop-and-create-tables");
    props.put("eclipselink.logging.level", "INFO");

    try{
    em = Persistence.createEntityManagerFactory("BirdDogDataPU",props).createEntityManager();
    } catch(PersistenceUnitLoadingException e){
      System.out.println(e.getMessage());
      throw e;
    }

  }

In the build-impl.xml file:

On a slightly different note:
Does anyone else ever enter their password into the username field? About 20% of the time, my login pages will open without the username auto-populated and I automatically start typing my password, oblivious to the fact my cursor is in the wrong place. Have you ever done this?  No, just me. Yeah, I figured as much.