Junit (3.8.1) testing that an exception is thrown (works in unit test, fails when added to a testSuite)

Question

I'm trying to test that I'm throwing an exception when appropriate. In my test class I have a method similar to the following:

public void testParseException() {

    try {
        ClientEntitySingleton.getInstance();
        fail("should have thrown exception.");
    } catch (RuntimeException re) {
        assertEquals(
            "<exception message>",
            re.getMessage());
    }
}

This works fine (green bar) whenever I run that single unitTest class. However, when I add that test to a testSuite, I get a red bar Unit test failure reported on the exception.

One more thing... it works in the testSuite, if it's the first test in the suite. Actually, I'm doing two of these tests and just figured out that if I make them the first two tests in the suite, all is good, but I get this failure if a "regular" test precedes it. So I have a work-around, but no real answer.

Any ideas?

Heres'a stack trace of the "failure"

java.lang.RuntimeException: ProcEntity client dn="Xxxxxx/Xxxx/XXX" is defined multiple times. at com.someco.someprod.clientEntityManagement.ClientEntitySingleton.addClientEntity(ClientEntitySingleton.java:247) at com.someco.someprod.clientEntityManagement.ClientEntitySingleton.startElement(ClientEntitySingleton.java:264) at org.apache.xerces.parsers.AbstractSAXParser.startElement(Unknown Source) at org.apache.xerces.impl.XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl.scanStartElement(Unknown Source) at org.apache.xerces.impl.XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl$FragmentContentDispatcher.dispatch(Unknown Source) at org.apache.xerces.impl.XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl.scanDocument(Unknown Source) at org.apache.xerces.parsers.XML11Configuration.parse(Unknown Source) at org.apache.xerces.parsers.XML11Configuration.parse(Unknown Source) at org.apache.xerces.parsers.XMLParser.parse(Unknown Source) at org.apache.xerces.parsers.AbstractSAXParser.parse(Unknown Source) at com.someco.someprod.clientEntityManagement.ClientEntitySingleton.parse(ClientEntitySingleton.java:216) at com.someco.someprod.clientEntityManagement.ClientEntitySingleton.reload(ClientEntitySingleton.java:303) at com.someco.someprod.clientEntityManagement.ClientEntitySingleton.setInputSourceProvider(ClientEntitySingleton.java:88) at com.someco.someprod.clientEntityManagement.test.TestClientBase.setUp(TestClientBase.java:17) at com.someco.someprod.clientEntityManagement.test.TestClientEntityDup.setUp(TestClientEntityDup.java:8) at junit.framework.TestCase.runBare(TestCase.java:125) at junit.framework.TestResult$1.protect(TestResult.java:106) at junit.framework.TestResult.runProtected(TestResult.java:124) at junit.framework.TestResult.run(TestResult.java:109) at junit.framework.TestCase.run(TestCase.java:118) at junit.framework.TestSuite.runTest(TestSuite.java:208) at junit.framework.TestSuite.run(TestSuite.java:203) at junit.framework.TestSuite.runTest(TestSuite.java:208) at junit.framework.TestSuite.run(TestSuite.java:203) at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.junit.runner.junit3.JUnit3TestReference.run(JUnit3TestReference.java:128) at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.junit.runner.TestExecution.run(TestExecution.java:38) at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.junit.runner.RemoteTestRunner.runTests(RemoteTestRunner.java:460) at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.junit.runner.RemoteTestRunner.runTests(RemoteTestRunner.java:673) at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.junit.runner.RemoteTestRunner.run(RemoteTestRunner.java:386) at org.eclipse.jdt.internal.junit.runner.RemoteTestRunner.main(RemoteTestRunner.java:196)

Answer 1

Without seeing the rest of the code it's difficult to tell, but are there other tests that are using ClientEntitySingleton and calling its getInstance method? If you have a lazy init singleton, then it wouldn't be being initialized multiple times.

Have you tried forking the tests into a separate JVM and see if you still have the problem?

Answer 2

I would suggest that you do not catch RuntimeException, which has about a thousand subclasses.

Based on the name of your class, it sounds as if you are only expecting ParseException. This is what you should be catching in your test.

Finally, assuming that you are running these tests in an IDE (because of the references to red/green bars), you should examine the failure message of the case - JUnit should report what the expected message was versus what the actual message is. This will help you diagnose what is actually going on, which should help you figure out why you might get one type of behavior when the test is run isolated vs run as a group.

Answer 3

Just realized that I never posted the "answer" to this problem.

The ClientEntitySingleton was set up so that on initialization, it would simply cache the name of the xml file to be loaded. It is loaded on first reference, and it is reloaded if you change the file name once the singleton data is loaded.

So, as long as the failures occurred before a successful load, the parse took place during the test case (1st access). Once I had successfully loaded an XML file, any future changes to the source file property triggered an immediate parse of the XML file. Unfortunately, I was setting the file name in the test setup method. (That's actually right there in the stack trace.)

So, if you think JUnit is not working with testing exceptions, this isn't your confirmation.