EJBContainer, OpenEJB and single start/stop by (test) JVM

When testing a EE application you regularly rely on EJBContainer.

One issue is its lifecycle handling. Most of implementations map it (and that’s really correct) to the test lifecycle. In summary it looks like:

@BeforeClass
public static void boot() {
    container = EJBContainer.createEJBContainer();
}

@AfterClass
public static void shutdown() {
    container.close();
}

That’s what does openejb-junit too when you use EJBContainerRule.

It is great but when having a lot of tests starting/stopping the container for each test can be time consuming compared to the test duration.

If each test uses the same config just start the container/app once and run your tests.

To do it with OpenEJB just add in container properties the following property (available from coming 4.7.0 version):

openejb.ejbcontainer.close = single-jvm

This will basically prevent container.close() to close the container and register a shutdown hook on the JVM to call it.

The drawback doing it is it breaks the ability of OpenEJB to inject beans/resources in the tests which didn’t boot the container.

To solve it just decorate your tests with @ManagedBean.

Here what a test can look like using openejb-junit module:

@ManagedBean
@Properties(
    @Property(
        key = OpenEjbContainer.OPENEJB_EJBCONTAINER_CLOSE,
        value = OpenEjbContainer.OPENEJB_EJBCONTAINER_CLOSE_SINGLE))
public class Bean1Test {
    @ClassRule // or just @Rule to pass test instance to the constructor and avoid to call inject(this)
    public static final EJBContainerRule r = new EJBContainerRule();

    @Inject
    private Bean bean;

    @Test
    public void a() {
        r.inject(this);
        assertEquals("bean", bean.name());
    }
}

Side note: in this case the properties shouldn’t be on the test class since they will be shared accross all tests but in surefire for instance.

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