Unit testing stored procedures with Junit

Anyone who has used an automated unit testing framework such as Junit knows just how life-changing an automated test suite can be.   Once you've  experienced validating that recent changes have not broken old code, or discovering subtle bugs via junit that would otherwise have remained undetected , you naturally want to have this capability in all your programming environments.

Guisseppe Maxia has written a few stored procedure snippets to assist with automated unit testing of MySQL routines.  Unfortunately, the MySQL stored procedure language itself does not have the necessary abilities to fully implement the sort of unit testing we would like.  In particular, the inability for a stored procedure to capture the result sets generated by another stored procedure prevents a stored procedure from fully unit testing another. 

So I decided that - for me - Junit offered the best solution.  I created an extension to the Junit class that contains some assertions useful when unit testing stored procedure and extended my PlainSql JDBC wrapper classes to allow a stored procedure to return a single object that contains all its result sets and the values of OUT or INOUT parameters.   This object can be made the target of the various assertions.

If you're not familiar with Java and/or, you might feel that this solution is not for you.  However, the amount of java programming you need to do is very minimal and GUI environments such as Eclipse make it very easy to set up.  The rest of this article is available here;  it contains instructions, my Java classes and examples for setting up Junit test cases for MySQL stored procedures.

Comments

[keexiaarenuic]

Nice site keep it up!