Loading Common Data for testing using Junit

[Supradeep Makam]

Hi,

I am new to JUnit test cases. I am writing junit test case for one of the java batch program.

I need to load data from database to heap memory in order to run the test case. Right now i am using setUp() method to do this, but i need to repeat this for all the test cases which increases the time of testing and some times i get the heap space error.

My question is, can i load all the data required once and keep it on heap till all the test cases gets completed?

I couldn't find any help on net in this regard. Have anybody faced this situation and is there any method to overcome this?

Thanks

[Jelle Klap]

As of JUnit 4 you can use @BeforeClass and @AfterClass to set up an expensive fixture shared by all test cases contained in that class.

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Supradeep,
There are two approaches. One is to use @BeforeClass/@AfterClass as Jelle mentioned. This works well if all the tests you want to run with that data are in the same class.

In my applications we have scores to hundreds of tests that use the same data so this is impractical. What we do is run a Java program with a main method. That main method does three things:

call method to load data

call JunitCore.run(MyTestSuite.class)

call method to unload data

This still gives the report on what passed/failed. It just does it in text form instead of visual form.

[Supradeep Makam]

Jelle / Jeanne ,

Thanks for your help. I am using @BeforeClass method for loading common data, this works fine now.