2011/08/05 - Jakarta Cactus has been retired.

For more information, please explore the Attic.

Cactus Configuration

This tutorial is only useful if you wish to manually configure Cactus. Most of the time this is not required. Rather you should choose a Cactus integration (Ant, Maven, Browser, etc) and follow the instructions there.

Here are the configuration files used to configure Cactus manually:

Configuration files

There are 3 kinds of configuration:

Cactus configuration works by setting Java System properties. You can set the Cactus configuration properties:

  • On the command line (using -Dxxx=yyy).
  • In a configuration file (recommended). By default Cactus will look for a cactus.properties file located in your classpath. You can override the name and location of the configuration file by setting the cactus.config System property. For example you can pass the following when starting the JVM: -Dcactus.config=c:/cactus.txt.
  • In your tests (using System.setProperty()). This option is not recommended as it is better to share a single configuration across all tests.
Please note that the different options for configuring Cactus works both for Cactus client side (i.e. from where you start the JUnit Test Runner) and for the Cactus server side (i.e. from where you start your application server).

Client side configuration

The following table lists the properties that can be defined on Cactus client side:

Property Name cactus.contextURL
Required Yes
Description Webapp Context under which the application to test runs.
Example cactus.contextURL = http://localhost:8080/test


Property Name cactus.servletRedirectorName
Required No. Defaults to "ServletRedirector".
Description Name of the Cactus Servlet Redirector as it is mapped on the server side in web.xml (see below). This property is needed only if your test classes are extending ServletTestCase (see the TestCase Howto tutorial).
Example cactus.servletRedirectorName = ServletRedirector


Property Name cactus.jspRedirectorName
Required No. Defaults to "JspRedirector".
Description Name of the Cactus JSP Redirector as it is mapped on the server side in web.xml (see below). This property is needed only if your test classes are extending JspTestCase (see the TestCase Howto tutorial).
Example cactus.jspRedirectorName = JspRedirector


Property Name cactus.filterRedirectorName (For J2EE API 1.3 only)
Required No. Defaults to "FilterRedirector".
Description Name of the Cactus Filter Redirector as it is mapped on the server side in web.xml (see below). This property is needed only if your test classes are extending FilterTestCase (see the TestCase Howto tutorial).
Example cactus.filterRedirectorName = FilterRedirector

Server side configuration

On Cactus server side, you only need to properly configure your application web.xml file to include definitions for Cactus Redirectors (see How it works if you don't know what a Cactus Redirector is).

You need to register the Cactus Redirectors that you use, and you need to map them to the cactus.servletRedirectorName, cactus.jspRedirectorName and cactus.filterRedirectorName that you have configured on the client side (or simply make sure that you use the default names, i.e. ServletRedirector, JspRedirector and FilterRedirector respectively).

Here is a sample web.xml that defines the 3 Cactus Redirectors: 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>

<!DOCTYPE web-app
    PUBLIC "-//Sun Microsystems, Inc.//DTD Web Application 2.3//EN"
    "http://java.sun.com/j2ee/dtds/web-app_2_3.dtd">

<web-app>

    <filter>
        <filter-name>FilterRedirector</filter-name>
        <filter-class>org.apache.cactus.server.FilterTestRedirector</filter-class>
    </filter>

    <filter-mapping>
        <filter-name>FilterRedirector</filter-name>
        <url-pattern>/FilterRedirector</url-pattern>
    </filter-mapping>

    <servlet>
        <servlet-name>ServletRedirector</servlet-name>
        <servlet-class>org.apache.cactus.server.ServletTestRedirector</servlet-class>
    </servlet>

    <servlet>
        <servlet-name>JspRedirector</servlet-name>
        <jsp-file>/jspRedirector.jsp</jsp-file>
    </servlet>

    <servlet-mapping>
        <servlet-name>ServletRedirector</servlet-name>
        <url-pattern>/ServletRedirector</url-pattern>
    </servlet-mapping>

    <servlet-mapping>
        <servlet-name>JspRedirector</servlet-name>
        <url-pattern>/JspRedirector</url-pattern>
    </servlet-mapping>

</web-app>
If you are using the JSP Redirector (i.e. you have test classes that extend JspTestCase), you must copy the jspRedirector.jsp file (found in the sample/web directory where you unpacked your Cactus distribution) in a directory in your webapp and you need to put its relative path in the mapping defined above (here we have put it in the webapp root.

If you want to provide some initialisation parameters that will be available to the config implicit object available in your test case, simply use the standard <init-param> tags.

For example, for the Servlet Redirector (same principle applies to all other redirectors): 

[...]
    <servlet>
        <servlet-name>ServletRedirector</servlet-name>
        <servlet-class>org.apache.cactus.server.ServletTestRedirector</servlet-class>
        <init-param>
          <param-name>param1</param-name>
          <param-value>value1 used for testing</param-value>
        </init-param>
    </servlet>
[...]
Within your testXXX() code, you can also call the config.setInitParameter() method (config being the implicit object of type ServletConfig) to simulate initialisation parameters as if they had been defined in your web.xml.

Last, if you need to unit test code that uses the Servlet Security API, please check the Security Howto.

Cactus logging configuration

Since Cactus 1.4, we have switched to using the Jakarta Commons Logging framework for Cactus internal logs (and any log you may wish to output as part of your test).

This allow Cactus to use any underlying logging framework such as: Log4J, LogKit, JDK 1.4 Logging or even a Simple Logger provided as part of Commons Logging (it outputs to the console).

Cactus is completely agnostic with regards to the logging framework configuration, so you will have to learn how to configure your favorite logging yourself. However, here are some tips on how to easily configure Log4j.

Log4J configuration

Create a log4j.properties file and drop it in both your client side and server side classpaths. Log4j automatically looks for such a file in the classpath so it should find it easily.

Now you need to add the categories that you want to log to that file. If you wish to see Cactus logs, you will need to add the "org.apache.cactus.*" category and set the logging level to DEBUG as Cactus only outputs logs in that level.

Here is a sample log4j.properties file for Cactus client side. You can use the same one for the Server side but we recommend to change the name of the output file in order not to mix the logs. 

# Properties for configuring Log4j
# This is the configuring for logging on the JUnit side (i.e. the client side)

log4j.appender.cactus = org.apache.log4j.FileAppender
log4j.appender.cactus.File = cactus_client.log
log4j.appender.cactus.Append = false
log4j.appender.cactus.layout = org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout
log4j.appender.cactus.layout.ConversionPattern = %d{ABSOLUTE} [%t] %-5p %-30.30c{2} %x - %m %n

# Any application log which uses Log4J will be logged to the Cactus log file
log4j.rootCategory=DEBUG, cactus

# By default we don't log at the DEBUG level for Cactus log, in order not to generate too
# many logs. However, should a problem arise and logs need to be sent to the Cactus dev team,
# then we will ask you to change this to DEBUG.
log4j.category.org.apache.cactus = WARN, cactus
log4j.additivity.org.apache.cactus=false

# Don't show debug logs for HttpClient
log4j.category.org.apache.commons.httpclient = WARN, cactus
log4j.additivity.org.apache.commons.httpclient=false
log4j.category.httpclient = WARN, cactus
log4j.additivity.httpclient=false
JUnit uses a different classloader to load each test of a TestCase class. Thus, Log4j will reinitialise for each test, thus overwriting the cactus_client.log file each time (this is because we have set log4j.appender.cactus.Append to false. You can set it to true if you wish to keep all the logs but the file size will grow quickly. In addition logs are really only useful when there is a failure and thus not appending is usually a good choice.