I love most of what's changed in JUnit 4 but I do have to say that I kind of agree with you on the syntax being a bit clunky.

Personally, I would've preferred having an alternative enabling the building of a test suite dynamically. Something like this:

@Suite
public class MySuite {
    public static Test suite() {
        // do it the old way
    }
}

...where there's the old suite() method and the class is annotated with @TestSuite (mainly to help tool developers).

You'll have to pose the question to the JUnit developer list, though, to get the answer you're looking for...

hi,
thanks for the reply.
i have several test classes to test, my Struts-Actions. i'm using <junit> and <junitreport> elements in Ant to test them and to generate the reports in HTML format.

up to this is fine. the problem is i'm using <batchtest /> in <junit/> which is executing the test classes in alphabet sequence. and not in the desired sequence.

to avoid that i'm using <test /> element in the <junit/>, which follows the desired sequence, but the problem is i need to mention more than 30 tags in <junit/> which is more adequate.

when i tried to run the test classes from java with JUnitCore api, it is executing in the desired sequence.

so my need is, i need to run the test cases from ant in some sequence.
is there any format for that or is there any tag that executes the TestSuite.

Afroz,

I don't know of a way to do that in JUnit 4. In fact, I don't even know that I would want such an ability. Why? Because the fact that you want to execute only some tests from a given test class is an indicator of that test class being too big and incoherent. A design smell. Instead, you should consider splitting your test class into two or more.

What I usually do is I run the single test case in Eclipse by just right-clicking it from the JUnit runner and selecting "Run" (or "Debug" if I'm having a bad day ;).

I'm not sure how to do this from the command line, though. I mean, Ant (look for "run-single-test") and Maven have means of running a single test class but I'm not aware of a way to run a single test method with them.

You can add @BeforeClass and @AfterClass methods to your suite class and have them coordinate the system properties.

For example:

import org.junit.AfterClass;
import org.junit.BeforeClass;
import org.junit.runner.RunWith;
import org.junit.runners.Suite;
import org.junit.runners.Suite.SuiteClasses;

@RunWith(Suite.class)
@SuiteClasses( { ExampleTest.class, AnotherExampleTest.class })
public class MySuite {

    public static final String PROPERTY_NAME = "whatever";

    private static String previousValue;

    @BeforeClass
    public static void setUp() throws Exception {
        previousValue = System.getProperty(PROPERTY_NAME);
        System.setProperty(PROPERTY_NAME, "value for this suite");
    }

    @AfterClass
    public static void after() throws Exception {
        if (previousValue != null) {
            System.setProperty(PROPERTY_NAME, previousValue);
            previousValue = null;
        }
    }
}

@RunWith(Suite.class)
@SuiteClasses( { SomeTestSuite.class, AnotherTestSuite.class })
public class CompositeSuite {
}

If you're running tests from Eclipse, how about just right-clicking the package and selecting "Run As > JUnit test"?

In any case, you could take this as a base and modify it to suit your purposes.

public static Test suite() {
    TestSuite suite= new TestSuite();
    suite.addTest(new MoneyTest("testMoneyEquals"));
    suite.addTest(new MoneyTest("testSimpleAdd"));
    return suite;
}

I am reading Pragmatic Unit Testing in Java with Junit, it suggests to put part of test cases in suite(), but leave those time-consuming ones in a high level class which contains all tests.

Then by default only test contained in suite() run, and those "big" tests only run when we invoke the high level test.

Unfortunately this book only talks about junit 3.

Maybe it is not a good way to arrange test cases?

public class TestSingleMethod{
	public static void main (String [] args )
	{
		JUnitCore junitcore = new JUnitCore();
		junitcore.addListener (new TextListener());
		junitcore.run(Request.method(TestClass.class, "method1"));
	}
}

package junittest;

import java.io.FileNotFoundException;
import java.io.FileOutputStream;
import java.io.PrintStream;
import java.util.ArrayList;

import org.junit.Test;
import org.junit.internal.TextListener;
import org.junit.runner.JUnitCore;
import org.junit.runner.Request;


public class TestSingleMethod
{
	public static void main (String [] args )
	{
		JUnitCore junitcore = new JUnitCore();
		try {
			junitcore.addListener (new TextListener(new PrintStream (new FileOutputStream("testresult.txt"))));
		} catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
			// TODO Auto-generated catch block
			e.printStackTrace();
		}
		junitcore.run(Request.method(TestSingleMethod.class, "test1"));
	}
	
	@Test
	public void test1 ()
	{
		System.out.println("test1");
		ArrayList <Object> emptyList = new ArrayList <Object> ();
		// Results in an error!
		Object o = emptyList.get(0);
	}
	@Test
	public void test2 ()
	{
		System.out.println("test1");
	}
}