Introduction

In this page you will see how to use the DBUnit-Plugin, a plugin that allows the usage of DBUnit datasets (think about them as test fixtures that use databases) in Grails. This plugin does not aim to cover all the points displayed in the proposal presented in the Grails wiki, but uses some ideas described there.

For a while, the project is hosted at http://code.google.com/p/dbunit-plugin.

So, how to use it?

First of all, install it typing inside you grails application:

grails install-plugin http://dbunit-plugin.googlecode.com/files/grails-dbunit-plugin-0.1.zip

grails install-plugin /where/you/download/grails-dbunit-plugin-0.1.zip

Let's take a look at some examples:

Using only one dataset to the test

Consider the following class:

class Person {
	Long id
	String name
	String email
	static constraints = {
		name(blank:false)
		email(email:true, unique:true)
	}
}

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<dataset>
	<person id="1" name="Pessoa 1" email="p1@email.com" version="1" />
	<person id="2" name="Pessoa 2" email="p2@email.com" version="1" />
	<person id="3" name="Pessoa 3" email="p3@email.com" version="1" />
	<person id="4" name="Pessoa 4" email="p4@email.com" version="1" />
	<person id="5" name="Pessoa 5" email="p5@email.com" version="1" />
</dataset>

Where to locate the dataset

The directory where the datasets should be located is test/datasets: inside this directory, sub-directories should be created to separate each set of datasets to the tests. For instance, if the test specifies that it will use the dataset "person", so create a directory test/datasets/person to contain the DBUnit xml files.

How to indicate to the test class which datasets to use

Totally simple! See next:

class PersonTests extends GroovyTestCase {
	static datasets = ['person']
	void testCountPerson() {
		def c = Person.count()
		assertEquals 5, c
	}
}

Tip: if you want, you can indicate the order the files will be loaded, numerating them as follows:

• test/datasets/person/0.data.xml
• test/datasets/person/1.data.xml
• test/datasets/person/2.data.xml

Indicating more than one dataset per test

You only have to add all the datasets you want to the list:

static datasets = ['person', 'city', 'country']

Datasets in "packages"

It is possible to separate the datasets in a structure similar to packages. For the following test class:

class PersonTests extends GroovyTestCase {
	static datasets = ['com/google/dbunit-plugin/person']
	void testCountPerson() {
		def c = Person.count()
		assertEquals 5, c
	}
}

Details

The datasets load/unload for a test happen only one time for each test class, in the same way as the JUnit anotation @BeforeClass. It works like this because the Grails integration tests are transactional and so it is not necessary to "clean" the environment for each test case (_in a future release, the plugin will decide whether it needs to do this if the test is not transactional_).

The operations executed in the datasets load/unload are, respectively, CLEAN_INSERT e DELETE.