Hello...
Quite new to using
jUnit, and of course, I am trying to use it for something other than it's base intended purpose.
I am part of a group who itegrate customers onto a platform. In this case, we take data in from many customers in many different formats and parse it. The parsed data is stored in a DB which was designed via IBM's VAP. The data is therefore organized and accessed through objects. In my case, each data file that is run is a batch, and contains many records, which in turn contain information that is accessed by other objects.
What I am looking to do, is to build a framework around writing tests on the data stored inside these records.
I am struggling with the organization of these tests and resources.
Here is what I know I need:
- Something to open the DB connection and close it once for the enitre suite of tests.
- Something to create a batch object for the batch I am wanting to
test - Something to cycle through each record within a batch and execute a suite of tests on each record.
The problems I am trying to solve are thus:
- Because the data from our customers is in a format intended for printing, I need to verify that information is where they say it is. By writing a test to see if data has been parsed, I can quickly determine which records in the batch I need to troubleshoot.
- If our customer adds new data, I can quickly determine if the new data caused any of the original logic to break.
- By creating a framework that gets a record, I can write tests on the record, or on anything that the record creates, be it a web page, PDF, report, etc.
I know this really isn't a unit test in the classic sence, as the data I'm getting is dynamic. The problem is, I don't need to test if the object will get me the data I'm looking for. It will....if it exists. I need to determine if the data exists.
Does anyone have any thoughts on how I might organize the things I need to do within the jUnit framework (or extensions)
So far I have been successful at opening a DB connection, but its not persisting the way I need it to...which may be due to the way I'm trying to organize the objects.
Writing a simple test case with bounds has been easy so far...this I'm stuggling with as I'm not quite sure which objects to extend and when to use them.
-Mike