How to have an object autowired and injected just once in a JUnit+Spring Test?

Question

I have a test case where I have an @Autowired Foo foo which I need to have injected just once, so all the test methods could re-use the same data foo has. What is currently happening is that upon every @Test method's invocation, the foo bean is cleanly re-loaded by Spring.

Is is possible to load this bean just once for the whole test class and how is it done?

Answer 1

This behavior is probably environment specific since they differ in the loading of the Spring context. For example, Eclipse does not automatically reload the context between tests but Maven does.

I would suggest that you write a @Before method that copies the @Autowired reference into another field and have your tests use that field.