Extending Junit4 or test case?

Question

Hello all,

We've got a simple webservice for handling queries about our data. I'd like to make a set of asserts/case extentions that would provide high level methods for testing various aspects of the response. For instance I could write assertResultCountMinimum(int). The method would take care of building the query, executing it, and unpacking the response to validate the data. I'd also like the to

I want to make sure I have the right idea in my head about how to go about this.

First create a test case class of my own, with the right setup and teardown methods. For our purposes, MyTestCase. Then provide a series of classes that extend Assert with the new assert methods. The end user of these classes would extend MyTestCase and would use the asserts that I've created. This is the pattern I think I see in jWebUnit.

I feel like I'm mixing and matching junit 3 and 4 concepts. I'd love to have just junit 4 concepts. But I can't seem to line up in my head the proper way to build this. Also, the assert methods that belong to Junit's Assert class are all static. Some of my asserts would require requerying the webservice. This makes me think I should really just provide the asserts as a series of helper functions inside of MytestCase. The later gets the job done, but doesn't feel right.

Any insight, musings, requests for clarification, much appreciated.

Follow up edit: As Jeanne suggests below, I'm creating a super class with all of my asserts & setup/teardown methods. In reality my asserts are actually helper functions which wrap around the basic junit 4 asserts, which I import into my super class. Any test of mine will just extend this super class. One caveat that I'm considering is making the super class abstract, since there shouldn't be any instance of the super class.

Answer 1

Marc, I use two patterns in JUnit 4. For "utility type" assertions, I made a static class. For example ReflectionAssertions. Then I use a static import to use those assertions in my JUnit 4 test.

For local type assertions that are only used in one class, I make them regular methods in the JUnit 4 test class itself. For example assertCallingMyBusinessMethodWithNullBlowsUp(). These don't have much reuse value.

I don't consider this mixing concepts because the later group aren't reusable outside my test. If I had reusable assertions that made webservice calls (and therefore needed state), I would create a superclass that did not extend TestCase and use that. My superclass would have the state and @Before methods for setup. As such, it is part of the test.