unit test vs junit tests

Unit tests are tests applied to a unit.
A unit is a small independent section of your code that you can test independently.

jUnit is a test framework with which you can write and execute unit tests.

If your feature is implemented by a single or limited number of classes and you can isolate it from other dependencies (e.g. by injecting mocks, see https://code.google.com/p/mockito/) you can and should write unit tests for it.

It sounds like you're talking about a web page which executes a search, likely going all the way back to a database. It's likely your implementation is mostly executing in the db. jUnit is really more for testing code logic e.g. a java library method for converting or processing something.

It sounds like you're talking about a web page which executes a search, likely going all the way back to a database. It's likely your implementation is mostly executing in the db

That is correct.

Cannot I use JUNIT in this scenario. please advise

Not easily. jUnit is really best for testing small modules of code.

If you can bypass the UI then maybe but since I would imagine your search logic is mostly in your database (and hence you can't easily isolate the tests from whatever data is stored in your database) it's not an ideal scenario.

@mccarl - Agree.

I was more trying to say this specific scenario is not the best example to show junit's power.

For search the logic is likely outside of java code either as a db query or a service call to a proprietary black box. In the latter case any testing is very limited since you might not even know what the 'correct' behaviour is. In the former at the very least you need to create a mock db of known data, and even then the nature of search results is vague and the logic is likely to evolve so your test cases may be expensive to write and quickly obsolete or returning failure negatives.

Likewise at the other end of the stack, I've always found user interface testing has rather poor payback - writing Selenium tests is more work than your average unit test and more fragile.

If you do decide you want to proceed then I would imagine tests like these (depending on what you're searching):

SHOULD_RETURN_EXACT_TITLE_MATCHES()
SHOULD_RETURN_EXACT_UID_MATCHES()
SHOULD_MATCH_MIDDLE_OF_STRING
SHOULD_SEARCH_FIRST_AND_LAST_NAME

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