This module contains several classes the improve the testing experience. If you want to test your serializers it is suggested that you extend the base classes provided by this module.
There exist several base classes that can be extended for easier testing of your serializers.
That abstract test classes work with every serializer. They don't make any assumptions regarding the type of serialization and therefore work with every type (binary or XML or another custom format).
But it is necessary to implement AbstractSerializerTest.verifySerialized
This is a basic test class that can be used to test a serializer. It serializes an object, verifies the result and tries to deserialize it.
The deserialized object is then compared to the initial object. The default implementation uses equals() to compare them. If custom code is needed just override AbstractSerializerTest#verifyDeserialized().
This base class supports multiple runs. It works on lists (instead of single objects as in AbstractSerializerTest). This test class is useful if you want to test several object (de)serializations.
While this class offers more functionality than AbstractSerializerTest, it is also more complicated to use. Therefore it seems to be a good practice to first create a test extending AbstractSerializerTest. And then create another test (or convert the first one) to extend AbstractSerializerMultiTest later.
Test cases extending AbstractVersionTest are used to ensure that the different format versions are deserialized successfully by newer versions of your serializers. Therefore serialized objects of the different supported formats are deserialized within this test case.
It is very important to created one version test for each serializer. Every time the format changes (and therefore the supported version range of the serializer is changed) an additional entry should be added to this test case.
So it is possible to hold a complete history with samples for every format version and test them against the current serializer.
For each common base class there exists a counter part supporting XML based serializers. Those base classes are based on strings. So it is easier to write new tests because it is possible to simply return the expected XML as string.
Comparisons are done automatically using XMLAssert. So minor differences (like line breaks etc.) in the XML don't matter and can be ignored safely.
The base classes used for XML based serializer tests are those:
