Integration Testing POSTing an entire object to Spring MVC controller

I had the same question and it turned out the solution was fairly simple, by using JSON marshaller.
Having your controller just change the signature by changing @ModelAttribute("newObject") to @RequestBody. Like this:

@Controller
@RequestMapping(value = "/somewhere/new")
public class SomewhereController {

    @RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.POST)
    public String post(@RequestBody NewObject newObject) {
        // ...
    }
}

Then in your tests you can simply say:

NewObject newObjectInstance = new NewObject();
// setting fields for the NewObject  

mockMvc.perform(MockMvcRequestBuilders.post(uri)
  .content(asJsonString(newObjectInstance))
  .contentType(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)
  .accept(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON));

Where the asJsonString method is just:

public static String asJsonString(final Object obj) {
    try {
        final ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
        final String jsonContent = mapper.writeValueAsString(obj);
        return jsonContent;
    } catch (Exception e) {
        throw new RuntimeException(e);
    }
}