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Classes that contain teh code for Integration Tests are named <class>IntegrationTest.java.

Events Concurrency Issues

We have detected an issue with the integration tests, related to the Context class. In this class, the List of events was implemented as an ArrayList<Event>. The issue here is that ArrayList is not a safe class for concurrency. Although this would not be a problem while running the application in a JEE container, as there will be a unique thread per request (at least in normal conditions), we can't be sure of the kind of calls users may do to the API while extending DSpace.

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In fact any class that calls Context.getEvents() may be affected by this. A comment has been added in the javadoc of this class (alongside a TODO tag) to warn about the issue.

Context Concurrency Issues

There is another related issue in the Context class. Context establishes locks in the tables when doing some modifications, locks that are not lifted until the context is committed or completed. The consequence is that some methods can't be run in parallel or some executions will fail due to table locks. This can be solved, in some cases, by running context.commit() after a method that modifies the database, but this doesn't work in all cases. For example, in the CommunityCollection Integration Test, the creation of a community can mean the modification of 2 rows (parent and new community). This causes this kind of locks, but as it occurs during the execution of the method create() it can't be solved by context.commit().

Static Analysis

Due to comments in the GSoC meetings, some static analysis tools have been added to the project. The tools are just a complement, a platform like Sonar should be used as it integrates better with the structure of DSpace and we could have the reports linked to Jira.

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