Running Unit Tests for RCP and OSGi Applications

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.