Question

Here is the problem I am facing. I have been tasked with testing the query parsing engine of a piece of software through negative testing. That is, I must write a large number of queries that will fail, and test that they do indeed fail, as well as having the expected error message for the particular error in the query. These are defined in an XML file. I’ve written a simple wrapper around the parsing of the XML document and struct-like classes for these test cases.

Now, given that I am using JUnit as a testing framework, I’m running into this issue – the act of running through all of these externally defined tests lives in a single method. If a single test fails, then no more will be run. Is there any way to dynamically dispatch a method to handle each of the tests as I encounter them? This way, if a test fails, we can still run the remaining ones while getting a report on what did and did not fail.

The other alternative is, of course, writing all of the JUnit tests. I’d like to avoid this for many reasons, one of which is that the number of tests to be run is extremely large, and a test case is 99% boilerplate code.

Thanks.

Answer 1

You should look into JUnit’s Parameterized annotation.