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

For more information, please explore the Attic.

Tomcat Quickstart forewords

This tutorial applies to Cactus 1.4 or greater and Tomcat 4.0 or greater.

This document is a step by step tutorial that explains how to set up Cactus and run Cactus tests in Tomcat in less than 10 minutes ! (discounting download time of course :-)).

There are 2 ways of packaging Cactus so that you can execute Cactus tests on your application:

  • By putting all Cactus jars in your WEB-INF/lib directory, as described in the Classpath Tutorial,
  • By putting the Cactus jars in your container classpath so that Cactus will load them using the container Context class loader. This tutorial will describe this strategy as it is the less intrusive one and provides reuse of Cactus jars across several webapps.
In addition to this, there are several ways to trigger the execution of the Cactus tests (see the TestRunner Howto tutorial). We will describe the easiest one to set up in this tutorial, which is by using a browser. Step 1 to step 3 are a one time install steps that you need to perform only once to be able to run Cactus tests within Tomcat.

Step 1: Install Tomcat

Download Tomcat 4.0 or greater and unzip it in any directory. Let's call this directory [tomcat-root].

Step 2 : Copy the Cactus jars

Download the Cactus jars from the Cactus download page. They are located in the lib/ directory in the zip.

Copy the following jars to [tomcat-root]/common/lib:

  • cactus.jar
  • commons-httpclient.jar
  • commons-logging.jar
  • junit.jar
  • aspectjrt.jar
This is the minium set of jars needed. If later on you wish to use the Cactus HttpUnit integration you'll also need to copy httpunit.jar.

Step 3: Modify Tomcat web.xml

Edit [tomcat-root]/conf/web.xml and add the following at the beginning of the file, after the <webapp> tag: 
<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>

<servlet>
  <servlet-name>ServletTestRunner</servlet-name>
  <servlet-class>org.apache.cactus.server.runner.ServletTestRunner</servlet-class>
</servlet>
Then, after the last <servlet> definition (there are a few provided by Tomcat in addition to our 2 above), add: 
<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>ServletRedirector</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/ServletRedirector</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>ServletTestRunner</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/ServletTestRunner</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
Warning: Be careful when you modify the global Tomcat web.xml file. If later on you wish to use the Cactus Ant integration and more specifically if you use the <cactifywar> Ant task, you may run into problems. The <cactifywar> task automatically adds the needed Cactus redirectors (thus they'll be added twice leading to an error.

Step 4: Creating a sample applicaton to test

We're now going to create a very very simple application to server so that we can unit test it. First, create the following directory structure: 
[tomcat-root]/webapps
  |_ test
    |_ WEB-INF
      |_ classes
Then, create the following SampleServlet.java java source file, compile it and copy the resulting .class file in [tomcat-root]/webapps/test/WEB-INF/classes. 
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest;

public class SampleServlet extends HttpServlet
{
    public void saveToSession(HttpServletRequest request)
    {
    	String testparam = request.getParameter("testparam");
    	request.getSession().setAttribute("testAttribute", testparam);
    }
}
You'll notice that this isn't even a finished servlet ! However, this shows that you can start testing your code with Cactus even before you have finished writing it completely. Extreme Programmers should like this :-)

We're now read to create our first Cactus test case. Create the following TestSampleServlet.java java source file, compile it and copy the resulting .class file in [tomcat-root]/webapps/test/WEB-INF/classes. 

import junit.framework.Test;
import junit.framework.TestSuite;

import org.apache.cactus.ServletTestCase;
import org.apache.cactus.WebRequest;

public class TestSampleServlet extends ServletTestCase
{
    public TestSampleServlet(String theName)
    {
        super(theName);
    }

    public static Test suite()
    {
        return new TestSuite(TestSampleServlet.class);
    }

    public void beginSaveToSessionOK(WebRequest webRequest)
    {
        webRequest.addParameter("testparam", "it works!");
    }

    public void testSaveToSessionOK()
    {
        SampleServlet servlet = new SampleServlet();
        servlet.saveToSession(request);
        assertEquals("it works!", session.getAttribute("testAttribute"));
    }
}

Step 5: Run the test

Time to enjoy our hard work ! Start Tomcat by running [tomcat-root]/bin/startup.bat (for windows) or [tomcat-root]/bin/startup.sh (for unix).

Open a browser and point it at http://localhost:8080/test/ServletTestRunner?suite=TestSampleServlet

You should see:

XML output of ServletTestRunner

Step 6: Even more fun!

Ok, that's nice ... But what if I want HTML instead of XML? Don't worry there is a solution. Grab the following XSLT stylesheet (based on the stylesheet used by the <junitreport> Ant task) and drop it in [tomcat-root]/webapps/test. Then, open a browser and type http://localhost:8080/test/ServletTestRunner?suite=TestSampleServlet&xsl=cactus-report.xsl. You should now see the following:

HTML output of ServletTestRunner

This will work with any browser that supports client-slide XSLT transformations (both Internet Explorer and Mozilla do, for example).