Dependency injection problem in tests for Spring application

[Gabriel-Darbord]

Context

Generating tests for a Spring application that uses @Autowired beans.

Current Result

Tests were generated successfully, but dependencies were not injected, resulting in useless tests (always expecting a NullPointerException).

Expected result

EvoSuite should be able to handle dependency injection as explained in this paper.

Additional info

I've read from the v1.1.0 release that JEE support has been removed. It is unclear to me if this is still the case since v1.2.0.
I tried using v1.0.6 without success, but that is a different issue.

Can the latest release of EvoSuite generate tests handling dependency injection?

[priyangbhavsar]

@Gabriel-Darbord The latest EvoSuite release does not support Spring @Autowired dependency injection.

Details:
EvoSuite generates plain unit tests that run outside the Spring container, so @Autowired fields are never injected and remain null. The DI support described in the paper was experimental and never made it into stable releases. As noted in the v1.1.0 release notes, JEE/container support was removed, and it has not been reintroduced in v1.2.0 or later.

What works today:

Use constructor injection instead of field injection

Enable EvoSuite’s mocking fallback

Exclude Spring-heavy classes and test pure business logic

Conclusion:
With current EvoSuite versions, the observed NullPointerException behavior is expected.