I was developing a small web server using Jetty and Apache Commons FileUpload component when I faced the problem with automated testing of the upload functionality. Jetty has a very nice framework to do tests: ServletTester and HttpTester.

ServletTester tester = new ServletTester();
tester.setContextPath("/");
tester.addServlet(TestingHandler.class, "/");
tester.start();

HttpTester request = new HttpTester();
HttpTester response = new HttpTester();

request.setMethod("GET");
request.setURI("/");

response.parse(tester.getResponses(request.generate()));
assertEquals(200, response.getStatus());

My test had to upload a binary file to check the server-side processing, but I’ve found this is not an easy thing to do. I’ve realized that HttpTester class generate() method produces a String. Okay, let’s use BASE64 to encode the file! But this would not work, because FileUpload supports only «application/octet-stream» content type. Fortunately, FileUpload is an open source product, so I’ve just created a child class of HttpTester with my new generateBytes() method that did the trick. Basically, it is a slightly modified version of HttpTester.generate():

public static class HttpTesterBytes extends HttpTester {
    public HttpTesterBytes() {
        super();
        setHeader("Host", "tester");
    }

    public ByteArrayBuffer generateBytes() throws IOException {
        Buffer bb=new ByteArrayBuffer(32*1024 + (_genContent!=null?_genContent.length:0));
        Buffer sb=new ByteArrayBuffer(4*1024);
        ByteArrayOutputStream2 out = new ByteArrayOutputStream2();
        StreamEndPoint endp = new StreamEndPoint(null, out);

        HttpGenerator generator = new HttpGenerator(new SimpleBuffers(sb, bb),endp);

        if (_method!=null) {
            generator.setRequest(getMethod(),getURI());
            if (_version==null)
                generator.setVersion(HttpVersions.HTTP_1_1_ORDINAL);
            else
                generator.setVersion(HttpVersions.CACHE.getOrdinal(HttpVersions.CACHE.lookup(_version)));
            generator.completeHeader(_fields,false);
            if (_genContent!=null)
                generator.addContent(new View(new ByteArrayBuffer(_genContent)),false);
            else if (_parsedContent!=null)
                generator.addContent(new ByteArrayBuffer(_parsedContent.toByteArray()),false);
        }

        generator.complete();
        generator.flushBuffer();
        return new ByteArrayBuffer(out.toByteArray());
    }
}

To prepare the bytes I’ve made a helper function:

public final static String CONTENT_BOUNDARY = "<--(*)(*)-->"; // Spaceship!

/**
 * Get the binary representation of the file upload
 * @param fieldName     field name to use in the form
 * @param filename      file to load
 * @return              bytes array with file written
 * @throws IOException
 */
public static byte[] getFileRequestContent(String fieldName, String filename, boolean finalize) throws IOException {
    String content = "--" + CONTENT_BOUNDARY + "\r\n" + "Content-Disposition: form-data; name=\"" + fieldName + "\"; filename=\"" + filename + "\"\r\n"+
            "Content-Type: application/octet-stream;\r\n\r\n";

    File f = new File(filename);
    byte[] bytes = Files.toByteArray(f);

    ByteArrayOutputStream stream = new ByteArrayOutputStream2();
    stream.write(content.getBytes());

    stream.write(bytes);

    String finish = "\r\n";
    if (finalize)
        finish += "--" + CONTENT_BOUNDARY + "--\r\n\r\n";

    stream.write(finish.getBytes());
    stream.flush();

    return stream.toByteArray();
}

And now how it looks in the test:

HttpTesterBytes request = new HttpTesterBytes();
HttpTester response = new HttpTester();

request.setMethod("POST");
request.setHeader("Content-Type", "multipart/form-data; boundary=" + CONTENT_BOUNDARY);

request.setContentBytes(getFileRequestContent("data_file, "test/Nocturne.jpg"));

response.parse(tester.getResponses(request.generateBytes()).array());

assertTrue(response.getMethod() == null);
assertEquals(200, response.getStatus());
assertTrue(response.getContent().contains("cute!"));