Baffled: CPPUNIT_ASSERT_EQUAL for class

[Lynn Allan]

I'm trying to get a simple class able to use CPPUNIT_ASSERT_EQUAL with visual c++ 6.0.  I found a VERY helpful webpage from John Lam on setting up the vc project so that the link resolves and completes.

His sample code for Employee used std::string.  I wanted to use char*, but can't figure out what the CPPUNIT_ASSERT_EQUAL macro actually invokes.  I can look at the output from the preprocessor, and figure that it becomes:

::CppUnit::TestAssert::assertEquals( _john,
    _John,
    ::CppUnit::SourceLine( "EmpVc6.cpp", 82 ) );

I've defined _john and _John to have the same name, "John".  My code does a strcmp, and should consider them equal.

Below is the interface for class Employee.  I've defined everything I can think of for the macro to invoke for the equality test.  I put a breakpoint within each member function, as well as a
cout << "Reached xxx" << endl;
to indicate whether the code was reached. 

In every case, none of the member functions were reached.  I'm baffled what function to define so that CPPUNIT_ASSERT_EQUAL reaches my code.  As near as I can tell, it simply does the default equality check of whether the addresses are the same.

class Employee
{
private:
  char  _name[20];

public:
  Employee( const char *name );
  ~Employee() {}

  char* GetName() { return (_name); }

  bool operator==(const Employee& other);

  bool equal(const Employee& other);

  static bool equal(const Employee& first, const Employee& second);
  static bool operator==(const Employee& first, const Employee& second);

  friend bool equal(const Employee& first, const Employee& second);
  friend bool operator==(const Employee& first, const Employee& second);
};

[Baptiste Lepilleur]

I'm on a rush so I'm not sure I'm ansewering the right question.

But if you are using ASSERT_EQUAL to compare const char *, basicly you are doing:

const char *name1 = "john";
const char *name2 = "john";

if ( name1 == name2 )
  FAIL();

=> you are comparing pointer, not content.

Baptiste.

[Lynn Allan]

Hello Baptiste,

That's exactly the problem ... I want to be able to provide a member funtion of Employee that is invoked by CPPUNIT_ASSERT_EQUAL.  With my use of char*, Employee needs to use something like strcmp to determine equality.  It can't rely on std::string reference counting for default equality.

Consider an Employee class with std::string's for both _first and _last.  The equality test has to accept Employee("Smith", "John") being equal to Employee("Smith, "John"), but reject both ("Smith", "James"), and ("Smithe", "John").  To do this, there has to have a signature member function that the cppunit framework invokes.  I have so far been baffled to figure this out.  I think it has something to do with providing a ToString or perhaps a different assertion_traits.

Thanks for your help on this.  Sorry for my frustration and impatience coming through.

Regards,
Lynn Allan