Overview of test data builders

Tests that verify application functionality often require objects to test against. For example, suppose you want to write a test that verifies the logic for assigning an activity to a user in the correct group. In order to test this logic, you must have at least one activity, one user, and one group. Furthermore, the state of these objects must be appropriate for the test. For example, to test activity assignment, you might need to start with an activity that is unassigned.

Theoretically, you could execute these tests using the approach taken to create objects in a production environment. Within a test framework, this approach tends to be cumbersome for several reasons:

• Objects often have fields that are required at the database level. In a production environment, values must be specified for these fields. However, within a test environment, many of these values may be irrelevant to a given test. Setting these values increases the code length and can make the code harder to read.
• Objects may have values that are cumbersome to set, such as:
  • A given object may require a parent object.
  • A given field may need to have a value that is unique
• Objects in a production environment are tied to automatic application behaviors, such as pre-update rules or messaging events. These behaviors can be irrelevant to testing and may throw errors for reasons irrelevant to testing.

To simplify object creation for testing purposes, Guidewire provides test data builder. A test data builder is a class that can be used to build objects for testing purposes. Test data builders provide the following benefits:

• All required fields have associated default values. When you create an object from a test data builder, you only need to specify values for the fields relevant to the test. The class provides any required values not specified by your code.
• Helper methods exist to simply the setting of more cumbersome values, such as:
  • Required associated objects
  • Fields whose values must be unique
• Objects created from test data builders do not trigger automatic application behaviors, such as pre-update rules.

For example, the following code uses a test data builder to create a test user object and then print values from that object. Note that the FirstName value is specified in the code, but the LastName field is not. When the test user object is created, the FirstName field is set as specified, and the LastName field is given a default value.

var testUser = new UserContactBuilder()
    .withFirstName("Tom")
    .create()
print(testUser.FirstName)
print(testUser.LastName)

OUTPUT:

Tom
House 0006

Test data builder classes are also referred to as builders, data builders, and entity builders.

The base configuration provides test data builders for most frequently-used entities. They are declared in the gw.api.databuilder package. If necessary, insurers can extend these test data builders. They can create their own test data builders. For more information, see Creating and extending test data builders.