Unit test blues with CRUD methods on RDBMS
I had a small discussion with
Rajesh Babu about unit testing methods that involve CRUD on Database. There does not seem to be an obvious way to manage test fixtures and initial conditions for tests.
For example, i need to test a method create(), which inserts a record to database.So i write a JUnit testcase for this.
...
create(myObject);
Okay, now the assertion part.To ensure that the values inserted are indeed the ones supplied, I have to read them from DB and assert that they are correct. This test code gets complicated. Also, there is a lot of execution overhead in setUp() tearDown() methods of JUnit, since I have to set up and clean data in database for each set of test cases.
Though I wrote a simple set of classes which make use of property files to associate data with test cases and feed the data to test cases, the database problem remains unsolved.
Rajesh suggested using mock objects, but the first try proved too complicated to maintain them.There were too many mock objects representing the database.
Will ponder upon this and post any findings
