Title: Writing Test Cases For OpenJPA

Tips on writing TestCase for OpenJPA

You are welcome to contribute new test cases. Following are few suggestions and guidelines on how to contribute new test case to OpenJPA repository of 2000 test cases spread across 400 classes.

Inherit from OpenJPA TestCases

Unit Tests are JUnit Tests. The base JUnit test case implementation org.junit.TestCase has been extended to facilitate common initialization steps or configuration settings for unit testing OpenJPA. The inheritance hierarchy is:

As a test developer, you should inherit your test class from one of the extended TestCases. In general, SingleEMFTestCase is a good candidate to inherit from. If your test needs to analyze or count number of SQL statements, SQLListenerTestCase should be your choice.

Use correct name and package for test case and entity classes

  • Test case should be in a separate sub-package of org.apache.openjpa.persistence. or org.apache.openjpa.persistence.jdbc.*
  • Test case class names must start with “Test” e.g. TestEagerFetch
  • There are hundreds of testable entity classes. But if your test requires new entity classes, place them in the same package as that of the new Test cases.

setUp() and tearDown()}

  • OpenJPA TestCases augment the setUp() method to accept a list of arguments. In this list, you should specify:

  • the entity classes used by your test

  • the critical configuration properties

  • CLEAR_TABLES or DROP_TABLES : these are constants declared in the superclass which clears the existing rows or drops the tables altogether.

  • The following is an example setUp() method

  • Notice that some configuration parameters can be set in the setUp() method of test program itself. This is recommended for properties that are important for your test. The non-critical parameters such as database connection properties (unless your test is about some specific aspect of a particular database) are better be specified in META-INF/persistence.xml. The persistence name can be specified by overwriting the following method:
  • SingleEMFTestCase ensures that tearDown() method deletes all rows for the domain classes involved in your test. You may want the database records to remain for analysis especially when tests are failing. In that case, you may consider suppressing the superclass behavior of tearDown() by simply nullifying the method as

Annotate O-R Mapping

Prefer annotation over XML Descriptors for O-R Mapping because that helps to collocate relevant information. Unless, of course, the test is specific about variations in behavior across annotation and XML Descriptors.

Use JUnit assert*() methods

For verification, use many assertion methods provided by JUnit e.g. assertEquals() or assertTrue() rather than depending on printing trace with System.out.println(). If you want to trace generated SQL or other runtime information, use appropriate openjpa.Log property settings.

Create JIRA Issue

Create a JIRA issue. Refer to the JIRA issue in the comments section of the new test case.

ASF License

Remember to include ASF License header in the comment section of all the new source or resource files.

Attach the test to JIRA Issue

Package all the *.java files related to your test case in a JAR file and attach it to JIRA issue you have created. You must check in the radio button Grant license to ASF for inclusion in ASF works that appears near the bottom of Attach File JIRA page.