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Tag: DBUnit

DbUnit and Jailer

The easiest way of creating datasets for DbUnit tests is often to script out values from a real database. This can be done with a few lines of code in DbUnit itself (see DbUnit FAQs) but it’s easier to use a database tool that can export to DbUnit dataset files. Jailer is one such tool. In its own words:

Jailer is a tool for database subsetting, schema and data browsing. It exports consistent, referentially intact row-sets from relational databases. It removes obsolete data without violating integrity. It is DBMS agnostic (by using JDBC), platform independent, and generates DbUnit datasets, hierarchically structured XML, and topologically sorted SQL-DML.

It’s pretty easy to set up and has the advantage that it can flexibly script target data as well as all associated data necessary to satisfy foreign key constraints.

DbUnit

I’ve decided to revisit the JUnit testing Hibernate and Spring recipe that I posted a while back. A problem with the previous recipe is that it did not provide any means to initialize the test database. This wasn’t too much of a problem as I was mostly testing the data insert operations of the DAOs. I then used the same DAO to retrieve the newly inserted data and tested what came back. However this is no good if I don’t want insert operations on my DAO (if it’s to retrieve read only data from the database) or if I want to test the retrieval operations independently of the insert operations.

This post extends the recipe to include a means of initialising the database using DbUnit.