[Cppunit-devel] Test Plug In Technology

[Baptiste L. <bl...@cl...>]

    Some of you might have noticed, yesterday I committed a new feature for
the VC++ Platform.

    * What it is ?

    It is a test runner (named test plug in runner) that can load and run
test contains in a DLL that implement a specific interface. The nifty thing
is the test runner can reload the DLL. A feature that is to be implemented
is that the reload and test run would be automatic: if the DLL is modified
then it is reloaded and the test are run.
    The name test plug in came from the fact that the technic use there is
similar to the one used when writing plug-ins (at least, I believe so).

    * How do I use it ?

    Your DLL must be a standard WIN32 DLL, not an MFC extension (I don't
know if it is possible to load/unload them like I'm doing for the plug-in).
It must be linked against the same Run-time as the test plug in runner
(still those memory allocation/deallocation problem). Finally, the DLL must
export a function that is defined as follow:


extern "C" {
  TESTPLUGIN_API TestPlugInInterface *GetTestPlugInInterface();
}

TESTPLUGIN_API is a symbol created by VC++ Wizard, that expand to
"__declspec(dllexport)" when you are building the DLL.

The TestPlugInInterface class is defined in
include/msvc6/testrunner/TestPlugInInterface.h.

You must subclass that class in your DLL and implement the only virtual
method it has:
  CppUnit::Test *makeTest();

You guessed it, that method must return the test that will be used by the
test runner.

The example examples\msvc6\TestPlugIn\ demonstrate how to create a test
plug-in.

The test plug in runner is in src\msvc6\testpluginrunner. It still need work
(being able to save the configuration, managing multiple configurations, and
the automatic reload & run feature).

Ideas & comments are welcome,
Baptiste.

---
Baptiste Lepilleur <gai...@fr...>   http://gaiacrtn.free.fr/index.html
Author of The Text Reformatter, a tool for fanfiction readers and writers.
Language: English, French (Well, I'm French).