Before and after methods for testcases

Rationale

Initialize and dispose of resources that are expensive to create, e.g. a server instance, a network connection, ...

Note

This can violate the principle that unittest should be independent. For
some cases though this might be a necessary optimization to meet the 
goal that unittests should run fast - for other situations, setUp() and
tearDown() serve this purpose.

Annotations

The functionality can be used by annotating public static methods with the @beforeClass and @afterClass annotations.

Example

  class FtpIntegrationTest extends TestCase {
    protected static $server= NULL;
  
    #[@beforeClass]
    public static function startServer() {
      self::$server= ...
      self::$server->start();
    }
    
    #[@test]
    public function connect() {
      $this->assertTrue(create(new FtpConnection('ftp://...'))->connect());
    }

    #[@afterClass]
    public static function shutdownServer() {
      self::$server->shutdown();
    }
  }

Timeline

When a test suite is run, the following is performed for each test class added to the suite:

  * Call @beforeClass method if present
  * Then, for each method annotated with @test:
    * Call setUp() method
    * Call test method
    * Call tearDown() method
  * Call @afterClass method if present.

Definitions

• The @beforeClass and @afterClass methods must be public static.
• There may be one @beforeClass and one @afterClass method, not more.
• When the @beforeClass method throws an exception, no further tests in that class are run (and instead marked as skipped).

n/a

Slightly slower because of additional checks.

none.

- JUnit BeforeClass / AfterClass annotations: http://junit.sourceforge.net/javadoc_40/org/junit/BeforeClass.html http://junit.sourceforge.net/javadoc_40/org/junit/AfterClass.html

- TestNG annotations http://testng.org/doc/documentation-main.html#annotations

- Implementing patch http://xp-framework.net/rfc/contrib/rfc0150.diff

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