Testing

Updated PDE Build and Test Example

August 4th, 2008  |  Published in Builds, Rich Client Platform, Testing, Tips

I’ve just spent some time updating my example showing how to set up PDE Build and the Eclipse Testing Framework. I’ve generally cleaned things up and I’m now creating the test environment in the correct way.

As a special bonus, I’ve also thrown in coverage analysis using EMMA. And before people ask, yes I have tried to use Clover with PDE Build, but have had little luck due to Clover’s dependence on a specialized Java complier. If anyone has gotten this to work, I’d love to hear about it.

And finally, I had to change this example to use a test plug-in instead of a test fragment. For some reason when running Eclipse 3.4 (maybe related to p2?), the ETF is not finding tests in fragments. If anyone has any ideas here as well, please let me know.

You can download the new example here.

NOTE: I’ve discovered that the EMMA instrumentation task fails if you’re running the script inside of Eclipse and you have spaces in your workspace path. Avoid spaces in your path and you should be good to go.

Update – October 6, 2009: The sample projects have now been updated to work with Eclipse 3.5.1

Running Unit Tests for RCP and OSGi Applications

June 12th, 2008  |  Published in Builds, Rich Client Platform, Testing, Tips

Eclipse provides great tools for testing RCP and OSGi applications using JUnit, but there a few areas that are problematic.

  • It’s not easy to run all the tests in a set of plug-ins. The test launcher allows you to run all the tests in a single project, but RCP and OSGi developers are usually working with a large set of test plug-ins. Sure it’s possible to create test suites, but keeping suites up-to-date is a real pain.
  • It’s not easy to use test fragments. To find out why you’d want to use test fragments instead of test plug-ins, check out my previous post on Testing Plug-ins with Fragments. The problem is that even the standard suite-based solution does not work with fragments. There are workarounds, but they’re not very pretty.
  • It’s not easy to run all of your tests during an automated build using the Eclipse Testing Framework. This is related to the first point above, and again you can use suites to handle this. 
So to sum things up, I want to run sets of tests across multiple plug-ins or fragments and I don’t want to use suites. My solutions has been to create a simple bundle test collection plug-in that harvests unit tests based on a set of filters. To use the plug-in, you need to do the following:
  1. Download the bundle test collector which is licensed under the standard EPL. The archive contains the test collector plug-in and also an example plug-in showing proper usage.
  2. Add the com.rcpquickstart.bundletestcollector plug-in to your workspace.
  3. Create a plug-in that will contain a suite or set of suites that will load tests based on filters. The tests making up the suites will be generated dynamically, so you won’t need to maintain them. This plug-in will need to depend on the com.rcpquickstart.bundletestcollector and junit plug-ins, but that’s it.
  4. In your suite, add the following method: 
    	public static Test suite() {
		BundleTestCollector testCollector = new BundleTestCollector();

		TestSuite suite = new TestSuite("All Tests");

		/*
		 * assemble as many collections as you like based on bundle, package and
		 * classname filters
		 */
		testCollector.collectTests(suite, "com.mycompany.", "com.mycompany.mypackage.",
				"*Test");

		return suite;

	}

 

You can then run the test suite both inside of the Eclipse IDE and using the Eclipse Testing Framework. I should note that this works only for JUnit 3.x tests. JUnit 4 describes suites using annotations which makes it (as far as I can tell) impossible to dynamically generate a suite at runtime. If anyone has a solution to this, I’d love to hear it. 

As always, comments and fixes are much appreciated.

Running Automated Tests with PDE Build

August 6th, 2007  |  Published in Builds, Rich Client Platform, Testing

In a previous post, I provided a set of projects that you could use to get a sample build running quickly. The idea was that getting your first build running is half the battle. From that point on, you can make small, incremental changes to accomplish what you like.

A common request I’ve received, though, is to provide a similar sample build that includes the running of JUnits using the Eclipse Test Framework. Well here it is! Just download and import the sample projects, and follow the directions in the included readme.txt file.

Note: If you want to run this sample build using Eclipse 3.2, you’ll need to work around a PDE Build defect. For instructions on how to do this, check out the “Problems parsing feature file in a product build” section on the PDE Build wiki page.

Testing Plug-ins with Fragments

June 20th, 2007  |  Published in Rich Client Platform, Testing, Tips

As Eclipse plug-in and Rich Client Platform developers, we face unique challenges in how we structure and execute our unit tests. In this article, I suggest an approach to unit testing based on Eclipse fragments that can help us overcome these challenges. If you find yourself frustrated with your current plug-in testing options, read on!

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