I'm trying to figure out the best way to unit-test my *.hbm.xml files. Do not misunderstand...I'm not trying to unit-test Hibernate itself, nor am I trying to unit test anything that uses Hibernate. What I want my tests to tell me is if my understanding of how my *.hbm.xml files is correct.

To that end, I've started down the road of using SchemaExport to generate a schema from my *.hbm.xml files, import that into Hypersonic (in-memory for speed), and then perform some basic tests to ensure that the results are as I expect.

Has anyone else done this and have some tips/examples or can anyone offer any better ideas?

What exactly do you want to test? You could probably use something like http://xmlunit.sourceforge.net/, or probably let schemaExport generate to a text file and run the tests on it, don't know, you are the first one I heard of trying something like that.

I don't want to test that the XML file looks correct. If that's all I wanted, I could XmlUnit or some such mechanism.

No, I'm more interested in whether or not the *.hbm.xml files do what I think that they do. Specifically with regard to relationships, I'm wanting to test that I setup the mapping files correctly, defining the relationships to behave as my application will expect them to behave.

Such a test would create the schema fresh (using SchemaExport), plug in some initial test data (perhaps using DbUnit), then be a client to Hibernate, ensuring that Hibernate (using my mapping files) retrieves and persists everything as expected.

I'm a bit surprised if nobody else is testing this way. The mapping files are a piece of code that makes up my system, so why wouldn't I want to test them? They're also something that I'm likely to screw up if I start tweaking with them, so I'd like a suite of test cases to tell me if I break something.

Yes, the hibernate unit test package does exactly what ou mention (although it does not "pre-load any data into the test db).


Because your not really testing your mapping files. You are really testing use cases of your system and how the semantics of those use cases jive with how you have the entities mapped.