Asterisk-Java Testing with Groovy

Ivan Moscoso, Thursday, July 2, 2009 @ 8:03 am

Recently I have taken a bit of a detour into the world of telephony, working with Asterisk-Java, which by itself is a very valuable tool, and worth knowing a bit about if you are integrating a system with Asterisk. While it is a Java-based library, I am integrating it into a Grails application.

We have a fairly comprehensive suite of unit tests asserting that desired behaviors are triggered upon certain events initiated through the Event API. This is made even easier, as usual, with Groovy-- specifically on the testing front. Here I show two hypothetical test cases, followed by supporting code that works specifically with the Asterisk-Java classes...

 
import org.gmock.GMockTestCase
import org.asteriskjava.manager.event.JoinEvent
import org.asteriskjava.manager.event.LeaveEvent
 
def queueObject = // .... some object representing an internal queue
 
/*
 * Verifies caller entering a call queue will trigger behavior
 */
void testCallIAddedToQueue() {
  mock(queueObject).add('SIP/123', '3125551234').once()
  dispatchJoinEvent([channel: "SIP/123", callerId: "3125551234"])
}
 
/*
 * Verifies caller leaving call queue will trigger behavior
 */
void testCallRemovedFromQueue() {
    mock(queueObject).remove("SIP/123").once()
    dispatchLeaveEvent([channel: "SIP/123", dateReceived: new Date()])
}
// ...
 

The testcases above are fairly straightforward, hiding much of the details involved when working with Asterisk-Java. The 'queueObject' can be anything, really, as long as it contains behavior which we wired into the event-handling system Asterisk-Java provides. The important part here is how we can easily bind properties to the underlying Event types, and dispatch them so that our behavior is invoked.

 
private def dispatchJoinEvent(properties) {
  dispatchEvent(JoinEvent, properties)
}
 
private def dispatchLeaveEvent(properties) {
  dispatchEvent(LeaveEvent, properties)
}
 
private def dispatchEvent(eventType, eventProperties) {
  def event = eventType.newInstance([:])
  eventProperties.each { name, value -> event."${name}" = value }
  play {
    asteriskService.connection.dispatchEvent(event)
  }
}
 

Here I have a 'service' class defined in Grails which I call 'asteriskService'. It encapsulates access to the Asterisk-Java ManagerConnection instance, which in turn can dispatch specific events.

Of interest to those new with Groovy is the binding of properties within 'dispatchEvent()'. It looks perhaps a bit more complex than one would hope, but unfortunately JoinEvent and LeaveEvent do not have default constructors, requiring the code to 'new' them up with a placeholder argument, and then set any properties on the fly.

Asterisk-Java is worth checking out, but particularly nice is using a bit of Groovy to tie it in nicely. While this can benefit the application, you can see how it helps ease testing-- particularly as you start using more and more of what the library offers.

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4. Markdown, GWT & Regular Expressions in Groovy
5. Programming Languages, O’Reilly & The State Of Java

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1. 

   Would it help to have default constructors added to the Event classes in Asterisk-Java? If so feel free to file a Jira at https://secure.reucon.net/issues/browse/AJ and we’ll be happy to add them.

   Comment by Stefan, Saturday, October 24, 2009 @ 10:18 am

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