Fixture Conventions
Introduction
Even though one of the objectives of GreenPepper 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 programing 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, GreenPepper uses a fixture to mediate between the example expressed in the table and the system under test.
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.
The fixture name
The fixture name is found right next to the interpreter specification.
| simple fixture name | ||||||||||||||
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Since a fixture is a Java class, when GreenPepper executes the example, it will try to match the fixture name with a class name.
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:
Import tables
Import tables are special tables at the beginning of the document.
By using an import table we can remove the package from the fixture name thus improving the readability of the example.
| an import table | ||
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When GreenPepper will search for fixtures in the code, it will look into all the packages specified in the import tables.
| Example of fixture name with implicit import | ||||||
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GreenPepper will match com.xyz.stuff.FixtureName. |
You can have more than one package or namespace imported in a document. Just add more lines to the import table.
| an import table with multiple imports | ||||
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GreenPepper will search for the fixture in each of these packages until it finds a matching class.
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.
Use a free form with space separating each word for the fixture name and make the fixture class use camel casing.
GreenPepper will match the words of the fixture name with the camel cased class name.
| Camel casing multiple word fixture name |
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fixture name |
When using the humanized version of fixture naming, you must use Import Tables.
Explicit package won't work ex: |list of | com.xyz.stuff.the fixture name|
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.
When writing the example, you can omit the suffix Fixture from the fixture name. This keeps the example closer to the real domain.
| Suffix example | ||||||||
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and
will both match public class BankAccountFixture{
...
}
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