Testing of/with Plugins#

The PluginManager has to be initialized with the plugins, so that the plugins can be tested or that can be used for testing (e.g. JUnit tests using the loading of a knowledge base).

Since it is not necessary for this task to build the entire application and the plugins, we propose a different procedure: You need to include the following code block into the pom file of the project having the JUnit test; the code is inserted into the plugin section of the build section.

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-dependency-plugin</artifactId>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <id>copy-dependencies</id>
            <phase>test-compile</phase>
            <goals>
                <goal>build-classpath</goal>
            </goals>
            <configuration>
                <outputDirectory>target/dependencies</outputDirectory>
                <overWriteReleases>false</overWriteReleases>
                <overWriteSnapshots>false</overWriteSnapshots>
                <overWriteIfNewer>true</overWriteIfNewer>
                <outputFile>target/dependencies/output.txt</outputFile>
                <pathSeparator>;</pathSeparator>
            </configuration>
        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>

With the help of the Maven Dependency Plugin a file is written into the target directory, that contains the classpath and thus all required plugins. For this, all plugins need to be specified as dependency, as it is done for building the application; however, the scope "test" is sufficient. The scope "compile" should be only applied to the main application and plugins, that are extending other plugins.

It is sufficient to execute InitPluginManager.init() in order to initialize the PluginManger with the JUnit test using the created file. Possibly, a test-dependency on d3web-PluginManger is required, if not already defined before. In Eclipse, we then execute the tests using the command

 Run As -> Maven Test

which is also the command of Hudson when starting the tests on the integration server. Alternatively, the JUnit tests can be also started by

Runs As -> JUnit Test

if a fresh file with the classpath is provided.