Question

I have a maven project that converts text files of a specific format to another format.
For testing I have put in src/test/resources a large amount of test files.

I also have another project that uses the first one to do the conversion and then do some extra stuff on the output format. I also want to test this project against the same test dataset, but I dont want to have duplicate data sets and I want to be able to test the first project alone since it is also a standalone converter project.

Is there any common solution for doing that? I dont mind not having the test dataset inside the projects source tree as long as each project can access the data set independently of the other. I dont want to setup a database for that also. I am thinking something like a repository of test data simpler than an RDBMS. Is there any application for this kind of need that I can use with a specific maven plugin? Ease of setup and simplicity is my priority. Also I m thinking something like packaging the test data and putting it in a internal maven repo and then downloading it and unzip it in the junit code. Or better, is there a maven plugin that can do this for me?

Any ideas?

Answer 1

It is possible to share resources with Maven, for example with the help of the Assembly and Dependency plugins. Basically:

1. Create a module with a packaging of type pom to hold the shared resources
2. Use the assembly plugin to package the module as a zip
3. Declare a dependency on this zip in “consumer” modules
4. And use dependency:unpack-dependencies (plus some exclusion rules) to unpack the zip

This approach is detailed in How to share resources across projects in Maven. It requires a bit of setup (which is “provided”) and is not too complicated.