FetchOrCreate: An idea for automating object construction

PeteWeissbrod · **Joined:** Tue Sep 04, 2007 12:36 pm **Posts:** 23

Hibernate version: 1.2

One unit test phenomenon I continually revisit:

On TestFixtureSetup, I use SchemaExport (a very nice feature) to give me a fresh database.

On Test Setup, I use a test data "factory" to populate the database with some meaningful data. The testdatafactory is some very common code that varies by domain.

On TearDown, I clean all of the data from all the tables... something like this

Code:

  using (SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand(null, session.Connection as SqlConnection))
                {
                    cmd.CommandText =
                        @"EXEC sp_MSForEachTable 'ALTER TABLE ? NOCHECK CONSTRAINT ALL';
                        EXEC sp_MSForEachTable 'delete from ?';
                        EXEC sp_MSForEachTable 'ALTER TABLE ? CHECK CONSTRAINT ALL';";
                    cmd.ExecuteNonQuery();
            }

On TestFixutreTearDown, I use schemaexport to drop the schema

I am interested in automating my test data factory code, to remove some of the more mundane work involved with building a graph of dummy domain objects.
I was wondering if this syntax was attractive to you:

Code:

ICriteria criteria = session.CreateCriteria(typeof(Cat)).Add(Expression.Eq("Name","Sam")).Add(Expression.Eq("Owner",ownerObj));
Cat cat = criteria.FetchOrCreate<Cat>();

If the cat exists, return it, otherwise, construct it and add it to the session.