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Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2003 00:47:00 +0000
From: Thomas Hawtin <thawtin@tackline.demon.co.uk>
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To: Cactus Users List <cactus-user@jakarta.apache.org>
Subject: Re: invoking a private method of a servlet
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Ajay Kumar wrote:
> 
> I have a controller servlet with many private methods and want to write 
> a testcase for these methods. I tried using reflection for invoking 
> these methods, but got the following report:

Using JUnit, I've always found it easier to refactor so that the 
Servlet, in this case, delegates to a class with the bulk of the 
functionality. JUnit uses exactly the same interface (in the general 
sense) as the Servlet and everyone is happy. In any case it's probably 
not a bad idea to arrange for classes that extend other groups' code to 
be as small and simple as possible.

> <error message="null" 
> type="org.apache.cactus.client.ServletExceptionWrapper">
> java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException
> [...]
> Caused by: java.lang.NullPointerException
>     at 
> com.appnetix.mainprospecting.control.MainServlet.getEmailTemplates(MainServlet.java:226) 

That looks like your servlet throwing the NPE. Perhaps it's not 
initialised? Method.invoke will itself throw an NPE if you try to call a 
non-static method with a null target, althugh it doesn't look like the 
case in this instance.

w.r.t security/accessibility, for private methods you should usually 
call setAccessible(true) which is defined in Method's superclass, 
otherwise an IllegalAccessException will be thrown. As ever you will 
need suitably lax security, but Cactus requires that to be wide open anyway.

Tom Hawtin