[CMake] CMake and Ctest and CppUnit

[Pascal Fleury]

On Saturday 24 March 2007 02:05:42 BigWave at web.de wrote:
> Hi Cmakers,
>
>   I successfully set up a project with CMake and Dart server, and can run
> really simple self-written tests with CTest. And, yay, they show up on the
> dashboard. So far, so good. However, I would like to get my tests a little
> bit more structured and use CppUnit (Since I am a JUnit fan for Java. Other
> suggestions for [free] unit test solutions welcome though.)
>
>   So far, my googeling for tutorials on how to set this up best did not
> return anything useful, but I saw that some list members here have such
> environments set up. Does anyone of you have a good link for me - or
> better, can share own experiences/ scripts/ code ?

Hi!

By no means I imply this is a good solution, but it's one that works :-)

Basically, there are 3 parts in my solution for CppUnit and Cmake:

1. The cmake part, that collects all the files containing a unit test (their 
name ends in 'Test.cpp' on our build system), i.e. almost straight from the 
sample in the CMake book:

------8<---------CMakeLists.txt----------8<------------
FILE(GLOB UnitTests_SRCS RELATIVE ${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR} "*Test.cpp" )
ADD_EXECUTABLE(UnitTester test_runner.cpp ${UnitTests_SRCS})
FOREACH(test ${UnitTests_SRCS})
        GET_FILENAME_COMPONENT(TestName ${test} NAME_WE)
        ADD_TEST(${TestName} UnitTester ${TestName})
ENDFOREACH(test)
-------8<------------------8<------------

2. You noticed above there is a stub C++ file 'test_runner.cpp' that simply 
makes the correct test run given the command line arguments provided by 
CTest. It roughly looks like this:

---------8<--------test_runner.cpp-------8<-------------
#include <cppunit/extensions/TestFactoryRegistry.h>
#include <cppunit/ui/text/TestRunner.h>
int main (int argc, char* argv[]) {
  TextUi::TestRunner runner;
  TestFactoryRegistry& registry = TestFactoryRegistry::getRegistry();

  // run all tests if none specified on command line 
  Test* test_to_run = registry.makeTest();
  if (argc>1)
        test_to_run = test_to_run->findTest(argv[1]);

  runner.addTest( test_to_run );
  bool failed = runner.run("", false);
  return !failed;
}
---------8<---------------8<-------------

3. Make sure every unit test case registers with its proper test name. For 
this, I  used the CPPUNIT_TEST_SUITE_NAMED_REGISTRATION from CppUnit in each 
of my test classes.  An example is here:

---------8<---------SampleTest.cpp--------8<-----------
#include <cppunit/extensions/HelperMacros.h>
class SampleTest : public CppUnit::TestFixture {
  CPPUNIT_TEST_SUITE( SampleTest );
  CPPUNIT_TEST( testEmpty );
  CPPUNIT_TEST_SUITE_END();
public:
  void testEmpty () { int i = 5; CPPUNIT_ASSERT( i == 5 ); }
};
CPPUNIT_TEST_SUITE_NAMED_REGISTRATION( SampleTest, SampleTest );
-------------------------------------

Note that this is heavily edited, because our stuff contains a lot of other 
stuff unrelated to CppUnit tests, so there may be a few typos, but I hope the 
general idea should be clear from this.

One thing I noticed, but it came up on the list recently, is that when you 
have generated the Makefiles, and you run 'make test', nothing happens.
If you run 'ctest' instead, it goes through the tests. I have not investigated 
this further though.

Hope it helps :-)
--Pascal