Yesterday I had the pleasure of doing a session at SDN Day about Detroubulator, an open source SAP XI unit test tool written by my colleague http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/weblogs?blog=/pub/u/23912 [original link is broken] [original link is broken] [original link is broken] [original link is broken] [original link is broken] [original link is broken] and myself. SDN Day was a great experience and I'm happy that we got the chance to debut Detroubulator at the event. Today, the tool is available for download from the Detroubulator homepage. Grab your copy while it's hot! I'm excited about finally making the software publicly available and I'm looking forward to your feedback. Also, I'd like to thank the SDN members who helped beta test the software as well as Mark Finnern and Craig Cmehil for giving me a slot at SDN Day. Thanks, guys!
What is Detroubulator?
Unit testing your mapping programs is an important part of SAP XI development. However, unit testing manually in the Integration Builder is a time-consuming and error-prone task. Furthermore, it's a task that must, in an ideal world at least, be done every time a change is made to the mapping program. Detroubulator lets you write your unit tests once and for all and run them at the press of a button. The minimal effort required to run your unit tests means that testing can become an integrated part of development rather than an effort that only takes place when development is complete. Having a suite of unit tests available also makes it easier and safer to make changes to an existing mapping program; running your test suite at each step of the way builds confidence that the changes made to the mapping program didn't inadvertently introduce errors.
Who is it for?
Detroubulator is aimed primarily at developers. To make the most of the tool, you need to be comfortable working at the command line and editing XML documents. More importantly, in order to write your own test files, you need a good grasp of the XPath language. For information on how to get started with XPath, please see the Detroubulator FAQ (included in the download).
Getting started
To start using the tool, download the latest release from the Detroubulator homepage, unpack the archive into a directory of your choice and follow the installation instructions in the README.html file. To learn more about using Detroubulator, please refer to the documentation library, which you'll find in the docs folder below the installation folder. How does it work?
Every test case that you want to execute is stored in the so-called test file, which is a simple XML document, that also holds information about the mapping program under test and the XI server it runs on. Each test case refers to an input document and contains a number of assertions about the result of executing the mapping program with the provided input. When the Detroubulator tool is executed from the command line of your local machine, it reads the test file, passes each input document to the remote XI server and evaluates each assertion against the mapping program's output. If a test fails, its details will be reported. How they're reported is configurable. One option is to generate an HTML report containing the test results. Another option is to have the results output directly to the command line.
License
Detroubulator is being released as open source under the GNU General Public License (GPL). For the full text of this license, please refer to the LICENSE file in the software archive. For more information on the GPL, please visit the GPL homepage.
System requirements
Detroubulator works with SAP XI 3 servers. In order to run the tool, you need a Java 5 runtime and the SAP JCo libraries installed on your system. For more information on installation and setup, please refer to the Detroubulator FAQ (included in the download).
