Performing Requests

This section shows how to use MockMvc on its own to perform requests and verify responses. If using MockMvc through the WebTestClient please see the corresponding section on Writing Tests instead.

To perform requests that use any HTTP method, as the following example shows:

// static import of MockMvcRequestBuilders.*

mockMvc.perform(post("/hotels/{id}", 42).accept(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON));

You can also perform file upload requests that internally use MockMultipartHttpMockRequest so that there is no actual parsing of a multipart request. Rather, you have to set it up to be similar to the following example:

mockMvc.perform(multipart("/doc").file("a1", "ABC".getBytes("UTF-8")));

You can specify query parameters in URI template style, as the following example shows:

mockMvc.perform(get("/hotels?thing={thing}", "somewhere"));

You can also add Servlet request parameters that represent either query or form parameters, as the following example shows:

mockMvc.perform(get("/hotels").param("thing", "somewhere"));

If application code relies on Servlet request parameters and does not check the query string explicitly (as is most often the case), it does not matter which option you use. Keep in mind, however, that query parameters provided with the URI template are decoded while request parameters provided through the param(…) method are expected to already be decoded.

In most cases, it is preferable to leave the context path and the Servlet path out of the request URI. If you must test with the full request URI, be sure to set the contextPath and servletPath accordingly so that request mappings work, as the following example shows:

mockMvc.perform(get("/app/main/hotels/{id}").contextPath("/app").servletPath("/main"))

In the preceding example, it would be cumbersome to set the contextPath and servletPath with every performed request. Instead, you can set up default request properties, as the following example shows:

class MyWebTests {

  MockMvc mockMvc;

  @BeforeEach
  void setup() {
    mockMvc = standaloneSetup(new AccountController())
      .defaultRequest(get("/")
      .contextPath("/app").servletPath("/main")
      .accept(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)).build();
  }
}

The preceding properties affect every request performed through the MockMvc instance. If the same property is also specified on a given request, it overrides the default value. That is why the HTTP method and URI in the default request do not matter, since they must be specified on every request.