Data Management

Need for DataManager

Oftentimes, we will be using some static test data that is specific to an environment. The environment could be staging, production, development, etc. For maintaining the environment, we can have a separate class for managing that. This allows us to manage test data in an environment-agnostic way.

Creating DataManager

We can store the test data in any file format. For demonstration purposes, .properties file is considered.

import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.net.URL;
import java.util.Collections;
import java.util.List;
import java.util.Properties;

public class DataManager {

	private static final Properties PROPERTIES = new Properties();

	private static final String ENV = ConfigurationManager.getInstance().getProperty("env");

	private DataManager() throws IOException {
		PROPERTIES.load(getInputStream("env-test-data.properties"));
	}

	private static DataManager manager;

	public static DataManager getInstance() {

		if (manager == null) {
			synchronized (ConfigurationManager.class) {
				if (manager == null) {
					try {
						manager = new DataManager();
					} catch (IOException e) {
					}
				}
			}
		}
		return manager;
	}

	public String getString(String name) {
        String key = ENV + "." + name;
		return System.getProperty(key, PROPERTIES.getProperty(key));
	}

	private InputStream getInputStream(String file) {

		try {
			List<URL> urls = Collections.list(Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader().getResources(file));
			return urls == null || urls.isEmpty() ? null : urls.get(0).openStream();
		} catch (IOException e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
		}
		return null;
	}
}

In the above code snippet, we are:

• creating a singleton instance of DataManagerclass in the getInstance method.
• reading properties file from src/test/resources/env-test-data.properties in the constructor of the class.
• fetching the property key’s value from the System.properties. If not present, then fetch from the properties from src/test/resources/env-test-data.properties. This gives us the flexibility to override the properties from the command line as well.

Creating a test data file

env-test-data.properties should to be created under src/test/resources, as it is a test resource, so that it can be read from classpath when running the test suite.

stage.user_email = test_user@example.com

prod.user_email = test_user@example.com

Here, we prefix the test data key with the environment and set their respective values.

Usage

Assuming env (or an environment that is passed as configuration from command line as -Denv=stage) is set to some value and the respective values exist in src/test/resources/env-test-data.properties in the format expected and discussed previously, we can access the value of the env test data using the following code.

String userEmail = DataManager.getInstance().getString("user_email");

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In the next lesson, we will learn how to put all the concepts learned till now and design a complete UI framework.