Setting up the Controller to test

The controller we want to test is BasicController. The convention to create a unit test is a class name with a suffix Test. We will create a test class named BasicControllerTest.

The basic setup is shown as follows:

    public class BasicControllerTest { 
      private MockMvc mockMvc; 
      @Before 
      public void setup() { 
        this.mockMvc = MockMvcBuilders.standaloneSetup( 
        new BasicController()) 
        .build(); 
      } 
     }

A few important things to note are as follows:

• mockMvc: This variable can be used across different tests. So, we define an instance variable of the MockMvc class.
• @Before setup: This method is run before every test in order to initialize MockMvc.
• MockMvcBuilders.standaloneSetup(new BasicController()).build(): This line of code builds a MockMvc instance. It initializes DispatcherServlet to serve requests to the configured controller(s), BasicController in this instance.