Testing Storm Bolts and Spouts

Question

This is a general question regarding Unit Testing Bolts and Spouts in a Storm Topology written in Java.

What is the recommended practice and guideline for un

Answer 1

Our approach is to use constructor-injection of a serializable factory into the spout/bolt. The spout/bolt then consults the factory in its open/prepare method. The factory's single responsibility is to encapsulate obtaining the spout/bolt's dependencies in a serializable fashion. This design allows our unit tests to inject fake/test/mock factories which, when consulted, return mock services. In this way we can narrowly unit test the spout/bolts using mocks e.g. Mockito.

Below is a generic example of a bolt and a test for it. I have omitted the implementation of the factory UserNotificationFactory because it depends on your application. You might use service locators to obtain the services, serialized configuration, HDFS-accessible configuration, or really any way at all to get the correct services, so long as the factory can do it after a serde cycle. You should cover serialization of that class.

Bolt

public class NotifyUserBolt extends BaseBasicBolt {
  public static final String NAME = "NotifyUser";
  private static final String USER_ID_FIELD_NAME = "userId";

  private final UserNotifierFactory factory;
  transient private UserNotifier notifier;

  public NotifyUserBolt(UserNotifierFactory factory) {
    checkNotNull(factory);

    this.factory = factory;
  }

  @Override
  public void prepare(Map stormConf, TopologyContext context) {
    notifier = factory.createUserNotifier();
  }

  @Override
  public void execute(Tuple input, BasicOutputCollector collector) {
    // This check ensures that the time-dependency imposed by Storm has been observed
    checkState(notifier != null, "Unable to execute because user notifier is unavailable.  Was this bolt successfully prepared?");

    long userId = input.getLongByField(PreviousBolt.USER_ID_FIELD_NAME);

    notifier.notifyUser(userId);

    collector.emit(new Values(userId));
  }

  @Override
  public void declareOutputFields(OutputFieldsDeclarer declarer) {
    declarer.declare(new Fields(USER_ID_FIELD_NAME));
  }
}

Test

public class NotifyUserBoltTest {

  private NotifyUserBolt bolt;

  @Mock
  private TopologyContext topologyContext;

  @Mock
  private UserNotifier notifier;

  // This test implementation allows us to get the mock to the unit-under-test.
  private class TestFactory implements UserNotifierFactory {

    private final UserNotifier notifier;

    private TestFactory(UserNotifier notifier) {
      this.notifier = notifier;
    }

    @Override
    public UserNotifier createUserNotifier() {
      return notifier;
    }
  }

  @Before
  public void before() {
    MockitoAnnotations.initMocks(this);

    // The factory will return our mock `notifier`
    bolt = new NotifyUserBolt(new TestFactory(notifier));
    // Now the bolt is holding on to our mock and is under our control!
    bolt.prepare(new Config(), topologyContext);
  }

  @Test
  public void testExecute() {
    long userId = 24;
    Tuple tuple = mock(Tuple.class);
    when(tuple.getLongByField(PreviousBolt.USER_ID_FIELD_NAME)).thenReturn(userId);
    BasicOutputCollector collector = mock(BasicOutputCollector.class);

    bolt.execute(tuple, collector);

    // Here we just verify a call on `notifier`, but we could have stubbed out behavior befor
    //  the call to execute, too.
    verify(notifier).notifyUser(userId);
    verify(collector).emit(new Values(userId));
  }
}