How should one import large amounts of data for FIT/Fitnesse tests?

Question

We have a scheduling engine with large amounts of test data to test all the scenarios, so test automation is critical. We're currently hoping to use FIT/Fitnesse. However a single test has quite a large table of test data, so it doesn't fit very well into the mould of "two or three inputs, one or more outputs" that Fitnesse uses in its examples. Hopefully the other functionality of Fitnesse makes it worth using it.

I hear that there is a way to initialize an application for a FIT test with an Excel spreadsheet - not the Spreadsheet to Fitness function, mind you - but I haven't been able to find it so far. Once the whole spreadsheet is loaded into the application, and the application does its thing, we plan to compare either a number of output rows, or perhaps just the last row, to see if the test passes.

The application is currently pulling test data from a database for manual tests, but writing to a database, then initializing from it, is not preferred because of the performance impact.

The application is written in C#.

Answer 1

I can't give a definitive answer without knowing more specifics of your application. When using Fit/FitNesse, you typically write fixture code to interface between the test framework and your application, so you can use this to set up data in any way that suits your application. The examples you've seen use the Fit tables to specify input and expected data, but for large data volumes, this often gets cumbersome. So you might, for example, specify a file name of a spreadsheet in the Fit table that your fixture code would read to feed data to your application.

There is a set of fixtures to set up database data, in a product called DbFit.

This talks about Fit and Excel but is quite old so I don't know what its status is: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163841.aspx