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Introduction
Even though one of the objectives of is to create a common language between the business experts and the development team, there will always be a certain degree of difference between the natural language and the programming language. Hence comes the reason for having fixtures. Fixtures are the glue between the business expert examples and the software being developed. When running the table, uses a fixture to mediate between the example expressed in the table and the system under test.
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Collaboration demands Compromise
The goal of the fixture, is to translate from one language to the other so neither has to compromise their clarity or their design to match the other. The fixture is the compromise. A fixture is any class. It does not have to extend or implement any base class/interface.
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The fixture name
The fixture name is found right next to the interpreter specification.
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Since a fixture is a Java class, when LivingDoc executes the example, it will try to match the fixture name with a class name.
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What about packages?
Usually, Java classes are found inside a package and we can explicitly load a class via the package name.
An explicitly imported fixture | ||||
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Readability
The problem with packages and namespace and with the classes naming convention, camel casing and no spaces, is that they makes the example less readable for the business expert.
To help readability, we have the following options:
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Aliases
All to offen persons uses a kind of "not really human readable" language when defining names for classes, methods and variables.Those "not really human readable names" can be mapped to a more meaningful name of classes, methods and variables.
A second point is that persons tends to use its native language for defining names which mostly causes conflicts with the convention of coding in english. It is easier to write down the executable table in your native language and map it with english named classes, methods and variables.
You can use the annotation @Alias to specify additional name-definitions.
An example with aliases | |||||||||
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Import tables
Import tables are special tables at the beginning of the document.
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LivingDoc will search for the fixture in each of these packages until it finds a matching class.
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Humanized name
Event without the package, programmatic naming conventions are not the most readable form for the name of the example. This can be arranged by following the camel casing conventions.
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Note |
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When using the humanized version of fixture naming, you must use 4.1 Fixture Conventions. Import tables. Explicit package won't work ex: |list of | com.xyz.stuff.the fixture name| |
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The fixture suffix
If you wish to clearly distinguish between your domain classes and the classes that serve as fixture, you can add the suffix Fixture at the end of the fixture classes name.
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Suffix example | |||||||||||||
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will both match
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Constructor
A fixture can receive parameters during it's construction. You must have a public constructor that matches the numbers of parameters.
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An example with two parameters | |||||||||||||||||
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