Question

Whenever I run Automated Tests on my site, all the tables get cleaned to 0 rows. Is that by design? How do I prevent them?

Update: Found the real ‘culprit’
%test.jpa.ddl=create

Answer 1

That is by design. Unit tests should not have any external dependencies on some pre-existing state such as persisted data. If you need data for testing purposes, you need to set that up in your @Before setup method. For example:

@Before
public void setUp() {
    // The following loads test data from the YAML file
    Fixtures.loadModels("test-data/users.yml");
}

@Test
public void someTest() {
    assertEquals(5, User.count()); // 5 User records exist due to @Before method
}

You should take a look at your conf/application.conf file and notice that you have a line that reads:

%test.db=mem

This is the default setting – which says that when the application is run in test mode, use an in-memory database. If you want your tests to work on persisted data (not recommended), you can change the test mode db settings. See Play test documentation for details.