Using Stubbed Cassandra: Unit testing Java applications

My first article on Scassandra introduced what it is and why I've made it.

This article describes how to use Scassanda to help unit test a Java class that stores and retrieves data from Cassandra.

It assumes you're using a tool that can download dependencies from maven central e.g Maven, Gradle or SBT.

First add Scassandra as a dependency. It is in maven central so you can add it to your pom with the following xml:

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.scassandra</groupId>
  <artifactId>java-client</artifactId>
  <version>0.2.1</version>
</dependency>

Or the following entry in your build.gradle:

dependencies {
    compile('org.scassandra:java-client:0.2.1')
}

There are four important classes you'll deal with from Java:

• ScassandraFactory - used to create instances of Scassandra
• Scassandra - interface for starting/stopping Scassandra and getting hold of a PrimingClient and an ActivityClient
• PrimingClient - sends priming requests to Scassandra RESTful admin interface
• ActivityClient - retrieves all the recorded queries and prepared statements from the Scassandra RESTful admin interface

The PrimingClient and ActivityClient have been created to ease integration for Java developers. Otherwise you would need to construct JSON and send it over HTTP to Scassandra.

You can start a Scassandra instance per unit test and clear all primes and recorded activity between tests.

To start Scassandra before your test starts add a BeforeClass e.g:


You can also add a AfterClass to close Scassandra down:

Now that you have Scassandra running lets write a test. Perhaps you want to test a simple Java DAO that connects to Cassandra and executes a query.

And you have a backing table like:

CREATE TABLE person (
  id int,
  first_name text,
  PRIMARY KEY (id)
)

Lets TDD the DAO using Scassandra starting with our connect method:

Lets look at what this code is doing:

• Line 4: Informs the activity client to clear all recorded connections. This is to stop other tests that have caused connections interfering with this one. 
• Line 6: We call on connect on our PersonDao.
• Line 8: We call retrieveConnections on the activity client and expect there to be at least one. The Java Datastax driver makes multiple connections on startup so you can't assert for this to be 1.

Now lets write some code to make it pass:

Now lets test the retrieveNames function gets all the first_names out of the person table.

This will prime Scassandra to return a single row with the column first_name with the value Chris. We expect our DAO to turn that into a List of strings containing Chris. To make this pass we need to execute a query and convert the ResultSet, something like this:

Next lets say you have the requirement that you really must not get an out of date list of names. So you want to test that the consistency you do the query is QUORUM. You can test this like this:

Lets look at what each line is doing:

• Line 4 builds the expected query, note the consistency is also set. If you build a Query without a consistency it defaults to ONE.
• Line 7 clears all the recorded activity so that another test does not interfere with this one. It also clears the queries that were executed as part of connect (the Datastax Java driver issues quite a few queries on the system keyspace on startup)
• Line 11 retrieves all the queries your application has execited
• Line 12 verifies the expected query that was built on Line 4 has been executed

This will fail with an error message like this:

java.lang.AssertionError: Expected query with consistency QUORUM, found following queries: [ {Query{query='select * from people', consistency='ONE'}]

We can make this pass by adding the consistency to our query:

And we're done!

This has been a brief instruction to Scassandra but hopefully the above gives you an idea of how Scassandra can be used to test your Java applications that use Cassandra. We've covered:

• Priming basic queries
• Verifying queries
• Verifying connections

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