I’ve been using DBFit on several projects recently, and I’m really pleased with the results. If you’re not familiar with DBFit, it’s a set of Fit fixtures that allows Fitnesse tests to execute directly against a database, without you having to build a separate connector. This post shows you how to get started with DbFit with the least amount of pain.
We practice Test Driven Development at ext.IT and while TDD is a pretty mature discipline in most modern programming languages, it’s still not widely practiced in the database world. We’ve had some success in the past using TSQLUnit, but I prefer DbFit because you can use it to write Unit Tests as well as Acceptance Tests. In addition, Fitnesse allows you to add additional colour in the form of documentation to truly turn your acceptance tests into an executable specification.
One thing that doesn’t (at least to me) appear to be clear from the documentation is that to install DbFit to test a Microsoft SQL Server database, you can simply install Fitnesse, and then install FitSharp. The advantage of doing this, compared to installing DbFit from sourceforge is that you will be working with the latest and greatest versions of Fitnesse and FitSharp. The current instance of DbFit on sourceforge uses a Fitnesse build from 2008.
Here is a high level overview of the installation steps (more detailed information including troubleshooting steps is available at each of the links below):
- If necessary, install Java 6 from here: http://www.java.com/en/download/index.jsp
- Install Fitnesse from here: http://fitnesse.org/FrontPage.FitNesseDevelopment.DownLoad. As it mentions on the downloads page, just download fitnesse.jar, into the folder in which you’d like to install it and type java -jar fitnesse.jar -p 8080 (where 8080 is the port number you’d like to use to run fitnesse from – usually port 80 is taken by other stuff on your machine) at the command line. Fitnesse will unpack and install itself.
- If necessary, install .NET framework 3.5 or 4.0 from here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa569263
- Install FitSharp from here (choose the correct version for your version of the .NET framework): https://github.com/jediwhale/fitsharp/downloads. To install FitSharp, create a folder under the folder into which you installed Fitnesse (I name mine FitSharp) and unpack the installation files into this folder.
- Once you’re installed and up and running, follow the examples in the DbFit Reference to see how the whole thing works.
- One additional tip is that if you’re following the Hello World example in the DbFit reference, use the following text instead of the one they document in Step 2: Setting Up the Environment. This will correctly point you to the location of your FitSharp installation files and use the Microsoft SQL Server flavour of DbFit:
!define COMMAND_PATTERN {%m -r fitnesse.fitserver.FitServer,"FitSharp\fit.dll" %p}
!define TEST_RUNNER {FitSharp\Runner.exe}
!define PATH_SEPARATOR {;}
!path FitSharp\dbfit.sqlserver.dll
I’ll be posting some further information on using DbFit as an executable specification that includes acceptance tests, for Unit Testing and performance testing, as well as showing you some of the ways we’ve organized our test suites to make them more maintainable and easier to understand. Happy Database Testing!
