Testing and exception handling with Ant

This week I worked on a project that had to import employees from files into the BPM Directory. Since I changed the algorithm to a balanced-line construction I felt I wanted to have some repeatable test cases to try to hit every balanced-line case. Balanaced-line processing of files is not that hard, but it is easily to mis a record.

The importer used a property file in which it relates to the file with the data to import. So for every test-case I had to create a test-file and a configuration file. I named them like:

• test001_configuration.properties
• test001_medewlist.txt
• test002_configuration.properties
• test002_medewlist.txt

Then for every test case I wanted to copy the test???_configuration.properties from the test directory to 'conf/configuration.properties'. Then call the importer and finally replace the configuration file again with the original subversioned one.

For the importer a working ant build file was created with a run target. So I thought it would be nice to have a seperate testBuild.xml file that does the job.

So I created this file with first a simple copy-target that copies a backupped original configuration file back to the conf directory. I want to leave the project as it is committed to subversion after my test.

Then I created a macro-definition that gets the test-configuration-file as an attribute.
It copies this test configuration file over the actual configuration file. Then it tries to call the run-target of the main build file. And then it copies the original one back.

I found that the run-target of the original file could fail and in that case it should also restore the original configuration file, in stead of failing my test-script. With ant-contrib you can use a try-catch-finally the same way as in Java.

Here's my resulting testBuild.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<project name="TestDirectoryServiceSynchronizer" basedir=".">
<!-- Task Definition for ant-contrib.jar  -->
<taskdef resource="net/sf/antcontrib/antlib.xml">
 <classpath>
  <pathelement location="c:/repository/generic/support/common/lib/ant-contrib.jar"/>
 </classpath>
</taskdef>

<target name="copyOrgConfig">
 <echo>Copy Original Config-file Back</echo>
 <copy toFile="conf/configuration.properties" overwrite="true">
  <fileset file="test/configuration.properties.org" />
 </copy>
</target>

<target name="001-AddOneEmployee">
 <test-case configFile="test001_configuration.properties" />
</target>

<target name="002-RemoveOneEmployee">
 <test-case configFile="test002_configuration.properties" />
</target>

<macrodef name="test-case">
 <attribute name="configFile" default="attribute configFile not set" />
 <sequential>
  <echo>Copy Config-file @{configFile}</echo>
  <copy toFile="conf/configuration.properties" overwrite="true">
   <fileset file="test/@{configFile}" />
  </copy>
  <!-- call run -->
  <echo>Run DirectorySynchronizer</echo>
  <trycatch>
   <try>
    <ant antfile="${basedir}/build.xml" target="run" />
   </try>
   <catch>
    <echo>Investigate exceptions in the run!</echo>
   </catch>
   <finally>
    <antcall target="copyOrgConfig" />
   </finally>
  </trycatch>
 </sequential>
</macrodef>
</project>