Mocking a Hibernate custom value type

Question

I have a simple hibernate mapping file that makes use of a custom value type for one of the fields. The custom value type contains some reasonably complex business logic. I would like to be able to unit test my object persistence without the custom value type's logic. Is there any way to mock out the custom value type?

I have seen a similar question to this where the accepted solution was to enhance the custom value type to accept an injected 'strategy'. I don't particularly like the idea of enhancing my class just to cater for unit testing, so I would prefer to mock if possible.

Thanks to anyone for any help!!

Answer 1

I'm not quite clear on what is it you intend to test?

If you're actually going to persist your entity, you won't be able to mock Hibernate's custom type - at least not in the common sense of what "mocking" is; all UserType methods must return meaningful stuff. That's the main reason for "injected strategy" solution - doing it any other way would result in more work :-)

Now, you can most certainly write an extremely simplistic implementation of UserType and substitute it for your original type in test configuration, but I'm not sure how that's going to work for the actual persistence - presumably that "complex logic" is there for a reason and trying to work around it may result in DB-level errors. If that's not the case, than perhaps that logic has no place in custom type and instead belongs somewhere in the service (business) layer.