Unit-testing bean-initialization

I have a @SessionScoped bean that does some initialization at construction by calling various services (accessed via a service-locator). I would like to test if the initialized state of the bean is correct after its creation.

The bean looks something like this:

@ManagedBean
@SessionScoped
public class MyBean {

    public MyBean(){
        init();
    }

    private void init(){
        //call service-methods to initialize some fields of the bean
    }

    ...
}

I use the Mockito mocking framework for my unit-tests. My initial idea was to mock the services that get called in the constructor and inject these mocks into the bean instance, but this does not work, because Mockito needs an instance of the class to be able to start mocking, but the service methods get called in the constructor itself.

My second idea was to move the bean-initialization into a @PostConstruct method like this:

@ManagedBean
@SessionScoped
public class MyBean {

    @PostConstruct
    private void init(){
        //call service-methods to initialize some fields of the bean
    }

    ...
}

I read some other threads discussing this case and suggesting the use of SpringJUnit4ClassRunner and @Autowired, but I'm not 100% sure if this is the correct approach in this case.

So basically what I would like to do is use mocked services to test if the bean gets initialized correctly using those services. My questions are:

• What is the best approach for this problem?
• Is there a better way to design the bean so that its initialized state can be tested easily?
• Does testing the state of the bean even make sense in a unit-test?