[Cppunit-devel] order of construction, setUp, tearDown and destruction?

[Graham, T. <Ted...@cs...>]

We are in the process of adopting cppUnit as our automated test framework
for a large suite of business objects.  Our objects are reference counted,
so I want to check of how many object are in memory before and after each
test to make sure that neither the tests nor the code being tested are
leaking references.  

My understanding of a test cases's lifecycle used to be (from a doc I
wrote):
   for( testClass = testClass1...testClass99 ) // every test class
 	 	for( test = test1...test99 )	// every test in that test
class
 	 		testClass thisTest;	// e.g., CustomerTest
thisTest
 			testClass.setUp();	// virtual function, can be
overriden by testClass
  	 		thisTest.test()
 			testClass.tearDown();	// clean up anything that
was built in setUp
 	 		delete testClass;		// the test class is
destroyed after each test.
 
From debugging the framework, this doesn't seem to be the case.
Instantiation happens earlier, and tearDown and destruction are delayed
until after all tests have run.  I have a object BaseTest that inherits from
CppUnit::TestCase and is the superclass to all our tests.

Imagine I have a function getTotalObjects() that returns how many reference
counted objects are in memory.  I'd like to call this in setUp and again in
tearDown and verify that it hasn't changed while the test was being run.
But I need to know what the lifecycle of test class is, and when setUp and
tearDown are called.  Any help??

Thanks,
	Ted