[unit-testing] Java Project: Failed to load ApplicationContext

I have a Java Project in which I am writing a simple JUNIT test case. I have copied the applicatinoContext.xml file into the root java source directory. I've tried it with some of the recommended settings I have read of here on StackOverflow but still get the same error. Is this error happening due to my project being a java project and NOT a web project, or does that even matter? I'm not sure where im going wrong.

import org.junit.Test;
import org.junit.runner.RunWith;
import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired;
import org.springframework.test.context.ContextConfiguration;
import org.springframework.test.context.junit4.SpringJUnit4ClassRunner;
import org.springframework.transaction.annotation.Transactional;

@RunWith(SpringJUnit4ClassRunner.class)
@ContextConfiguration(locations={"C:/projs/sortation/src/main/java/applicationContext.xml"})
// Also tried these settings but they also didnt work,
//@ContextConfiguration(locations={"classpath:applicationContext.xml"})
//@ContextConfiguration("classpath:applicationContext.xml")
@Transactional
public class TestSS {

    @Autowired
    private EmsDao dao;

    @Test
    public void getSites() {

        List<String> batchid = dao.getList();

        for (String s : batchid) {
            System.out.println(s);
        }
    }
}

I've faced this issue because during bootstrapping my spring project using the class that implements ApplicationListener<ContextRefreshedEvent> and inside onApplicationEvent function it throws an exception

so make sure that your application bootstrap points do not throw any exception

in my case, I was using maven surefire plugin for testing so to debug the test process use this command

mvn -Dmaven.surefire.debug test

I had the same problem, and I was using the following plugin for tests:

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.9</version>
    <configuration>
        <useFile>true</useFile>
        <includes>
            <include>**/*Tests.java</include>
            <include>**/*Test.java</include>
        </includes>
        <excludes>
            <exclude>**/Abstract*.java</exclude>
        </excludes>
        <junitArtifactName>junit:junit</junitArtifactName>
        <parallel>methods</parallel>
        <threadCount>10</threadCount>
    </configuration>
</plugin>

The test were running fine in the IDE (eclipse sts), but failed when using command mvn test.

After a lot of trial and error, I figured the solution was to remove parallel testing, the following two lines from the plugin configuration above:

    <parallel>methods</parallel>
    <threadCount>10</threadCount>

Hope that this helps someone out!

I faced this issue, and that is when a Bean (@Bean) was not instantiated properly as it was not given the correct parameters in my test class.