boost unit tests with xUnit Plugin in Jenkins do not work

boost, jenkins, jenkins-plugins, unit-testing, xunit

Solution

The error is is because there is no output file generated by `boost::test`. The test script need to be invoked with the correct options:

unit_test --report_level=detailed --report_format=xml 2> xunit.xml

Unfortunately the XML output file produced by boost::test is not in the correct format (see: SO Converting boost::test logs & Boost Users Help with XUnit plugin )

The JUnit plugin expects XML test output to be in the following format:

<testsuites>
  <testsuite time="0.0000" timestamp="0.000" errors="0" failures="0" tests="13" hostname="localhost" name="my_test_suite">
    <testcase id="65536" class="test" name="test_case_1" time="0.0000" />
    <testcase id="65537" class="test" name="test_case_2" time="0.0000" />
    <testcase id="65538" class="test" name="test_case_3" time="0.0000" />
  </testsuite>
</testsuites>

There are a couple of ways to resolve this such as:

- Converting the XML output by `boost::test`

- Directly customising the output of `boost::test` so that the correct format is produced.

I opted for option 2 - ss you are not a 'C/C++' programmer you could get the author of the test suites you are trying to run to follow this approach, the steps below should help get them started:

- Create a test visitor for post processing the results of the test run.

- Create a BOOST_GLOBAL_FIXTURE class that walks through the test results in its destructor to output the test results in the correct format.

- Instantiate the fixture class in the main test module.

i.e.:

struct JUnitVisitor : public boost::unit_test::test_tree_visitor
{
    void visit( boost::unit_test::test_case const& tc )
    {
        // output <testcase> xml in JUnit format
    }

    bool test_suite_start( boost::unit_test::test_suite const& ts )
    {
        // output <testuite> xml in JUnit format
    }

    void test_suite_finish( boost::unit_test::test_suite const& ts )
    {
        // output </testuite> xml in JUnit format
    }
};

struct MyJUnitOpFixture
{
    MyJUnitOpFixture() {}

    ~MyJUnitOpFixture()
    {
        // open results file

        /// output <testsuites> start tag

        // use a visitor to walk the test results tree       
        JUnitVisitor visitor ( out );
        boost::unit_test::traverse_test_tree(
                 boost::unit_test::framework::master_test_suite(),
                 visitor
                 );

        /// output </testsuites> end tag

    }
}

Then the global fixture is instantiated in the main test file by adding:

BOOST_GLOBAL_FIXTURE( MyJUnitOpFixture ); 

Problem

Original source