We are using Spring for my application purposes, and Spring Testing framework for unit tests. We have a small problem though: the application code loads a Spring application context from a list of locations (XML files) in the classpath. But when we run our unit tests, we want some of the Spring beans to be mocks instead of full-fledged implementation classes. Moreover, for some unit tests we want some beans to become mocks, while for other unit tests we want other beans to become mocks, as we are testing different layers of the application.
All this means I want to redefine specific beans of the application context and refresh the context when desired. While doing this, I want to redefine only a small portion of the beans located in one (or several) original XML beans definition file. I cannot find an easy way to do it. It's always regarded that Spring is a unit-testing-friendly framework, so I must be missing something here.
Do you have any ideas how to do it?
Thanks!