Sharing parameters among different TestNG suites

Off late I have been seeing a couple of queries every now and then which asks How do I share parameters across multiple TestNG suite xmls, so I thought I would perhaps write up a post which details it.

There are two ways in which this can be done.

Approach (1)

Leverage what TestNG directly has to offer, which is “create a suite of suites”. Incase you are wondering how to get this done, here’s how you do it.

For example sake, lets assume that we have the below test class.

package com.rationaleemotions.wordpress.sharing;
 
import org.testng.Assert;
import org.testng.annotations.Parameters;
import org.testng.annotations.Test;
 
public class ReadParameters {
    @Test
    @Parameters({ "username" })
    public void f(String userName) {
        Assert.assertTrue(userName.equals("testng"));
        System.err.println("User name is " + userName);
    }
}

As you can see this is a simple Test class, which accepts a parameter via the @Parameters annotation and then runs an Assert on it.

Now lets look at how our suite xml file would look like : [ We will call this suite file as testng-childsuite.xml which is located under src/test/resources in my project]

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE suite SYSTEM "http://testng.org/testng-1.0.dtd">
<suite name="MyTestSuite" parallel="false" verbose="2">
    <test name="MyTest">
        <classes>
            <class name="com.rationaleemotions.wordpress.sharing.ReadParameters" />
        </classes>
    </test> 
</suite>

Now lets create a Suite of Suites as below : [ We will call this suite file as testng-mastersuite.xml]

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE suite SYSTEM "http://testng.org/testng-1.0.dtd">
<suite name="MasterSuite" parallel="false">
    <parameter name="username" value="testng"></parameter>
    <suite-files>
        <suite-file path="src/test/resources/testng-childsuite.xml"/>        
    </suite-files>
</suite> <!-- MasterSuite -->

Now run testng-mastersuite.xml and you will see that the parameter username that I had in my master suite automatically got passed over to the child suite viz., testng-childsuite.xml automatically and the assert passes.

Approach (2)

This was a new learning for me as well and I picked up this from this post on the testng-users google forum.

Our Test class is going to remain the same. So I am not going to be duplicating it again here.

Now lets create a simple xml file and add up all the parameters that we feel need to be shared across multiple suites.

Lets call it parameters.xml and it is available under src/test/resources/sharing folder in our test project.

Here’s how it's contents would look like :

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<parameter name="username" value="testng"/>

Now lets create a basic TestNG xml suite file and then refer to the above mentioned parameters.xml in it. Lets call it as standalone-testsuite.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE suite [<!ENTITY parent SYSTEM "src/test/resources/sharing/parameters.xml">]>
<suite name="MyTestSuite" parallel="false" verbose="2">
  <parameters>&parent;</parameters>
  <test name="MyTest">
    <classes>
      <class name="com.rationaleemotions.wordpress.sharing.ReadParameters"/>
    </classes>
  </test>
</suite>

Couple of items that are worth mentioning here.

• [<!ENTITY parent SYSTEM "src/test/resources/sharing/parameters.xml">]> is basically our way of saying that this xml file has an entity (which we will call as parent) and it maps to the resource parameters.xml that resides under src/test/resources/sharing/ folder.
• &parent; is basically our way of saying that within the tag we are going to be replacing the contents of parameters.xml, which we are denoting via the name parent (notice that we gave our entity its name as parent). The entity name is supposed to be prefixed by an ampersand and it is supposed to end with a semi-colon.

Now run the standalone-testsuite.xml and you would notice that the assert passes.

Hope that helps you understand how to share parameters across different TestNG suite xmls.

Note

• This suite may not be recognized properly by IDEs such as IntelliJ
• This suite will run fine when run from the command prompt using a build tool such as maven.
• When executed using TestNG 7.0.0.-beta1 you may see a warning such as below (which encourages you to add the DOCTYPE tag. If the tag is added then the suite xml will become invalid. Also its not sure till when would TestNG be lenient with suite xml files that don't have the DOCTYPE tag and start mandating it. Until then, this solution would work.

[INFO] --- maven-surefire-plugin:3.0.0-M1:test (default-test) @ testbed ---
[INFO] 
[INFO] -------------------------------------------------------
[INFO]  T E S T S
[INFO] -------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Running TestSuite
[TestNGContentHandler] [WARN] It is strongly recommended to add "<!DOCTYPE suite SYSTEM "http://testng.org/testng-1.0.dtd" >" at the top of your file, otherwise TestNG may fail or not work as expected.
...
... TestNG 7.0.0-beta1 by Cédric Beust (cedric@beust.com)
...

User name is testng
[INFO] Tests run: 1, Failures: 0, Errors: 0, Skipped: 0, Time elapsed: 0.384 s - in TestSuite
[INFO] 
[INFO] Results:
[INFO] 
[INFO] Tests run: 1, Failures: 0, Errors: 0, Skipped: 0
[INFO] 
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESS
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time:  15.861 s
[INFO] Finished at: 2018-12-31T10:22:36+05:30
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------