Testing Quartz CronTrigger trigger

Question

Assuming that I have a CronTriggerBean similar to

<bean id="midMonthCronTrigger" class="org.springframework.scheduling.quartz.CronTriggerBean">
    <property name="jobDetail" ref="reminderJobDetail" />
    <property name="cronExpression" value="0 0 6 15W * ?" />
</bean>

What is the best way to test that this bean will actually trigger at its specified date, i.e. on the weekday closest to the 15th of each month at 6 AM?

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Update: This is supposed to be an unit test, so I'm not going to fire up a VM or change the system time.

Answer 1

1. You can always wait until the 15h of July.
2. Being more serious... If it's really a key part of the application and I you need to have it tested fully. I would recommend using some virtualization setups and have the application installed within some guest machine. Then you could play with the system clock and test different date/times without spending a whole month on it. Moreover there's nothing that should stop you from automating such tests.

Answer 2

Well firstly, there's no point in testing CronTriggerBean itself. It's part of the spring framework, and has already been tested.

A better test might be to test that your cron expression is what you expect. One option here is to use Quartz's CronExpression class. Given a CronExpression object, you can call getNextValidTimeAfter(Date), which returns the next time after the given Date when the expression will fire.