Before and After Suite execution hook in jUnit 4.x

Question

I'm trying to preform setup and teardown for a set of integration tests, using jUnit 4.4 to execute the tests. The teardown needs to be run reliably. I'm having other problems with TestNG, so I'm looking to port back to jUnit. What hooks are available for execution before any tests are run and after all tests have completed?

Note: we're using maven 2 for our build. I've tried using maven's pre- & post-integration-test phases, but, if a test fails, maven stops and doesn't run post-integration-test, which is no help.

Answer 1

Yes, it is possible to reliably run set up and tear down methods before and after any tests in a test suite. Let me demonstrate in code:

package com.test;

import org.junit.AfterClass;
import org.junit.BeforeClass;
import org.junit.runner.RunWith;
import org.junit.runners.Suite;
import org.junit.runners.Suite.SuiteClasses;

@RunWith(Suite.class)
@SuiteClasses({Test1.class, Test2.class})
public class TestSuite {

    @BeforeClass
    public static void setUp() {
        System.out.println("setting up");
    }

    @AfterClass
    public static void tearDown() {
        System.out.println("tearing down");
    }

}

So your Test1 class would look something like:

package com.test;

import org.junit.Test;


public class Test1 {
    @Test
    public void test1() {
        System.out.println("test1");
    }

}

...and you can imagine that Test2 looks similar. If you ran TestSuite, you would get:

setting up
test1
test2
tearing down

So you can see that the set up/tear down only run before and after all tests, respectively.

The catch: this only works if you're running the test suite, and not running Test1 and Test2 as individual JUnit tests. You mentioned you're using maven, and the maven surefire plugin likes to run tests individually, and not part of a suite. In this case, I would recommend creating a superclass that each test class extends. The superclass then contains the annotated @BeforeClass and @AfterClass methods. Although not quite as clean as the above method, I think it will work for you.

As for the problem with failed tests, you can set maven.test.error.ignore so that the build continues on failed tests. This is not recommended as a continuing practice, but it should get you functioning until all of your tests pass. For more detail, see the maven surefire documentation.