What To TestThe

What To TestThe topic

• Test with resolver methods: Even though you can instantiate a provider object in ProviderTestCase2, you should always test with a resolver object using the appropriate URI. This ensures that you are testing the provider using the same interaction that a regular application would use.
• Test a public provider as a contract: If you intent your provider to be public and available to other applications, you should test it as a contract. This includes the following ideas:
  • Test with constants that your provider publicly exposes. For example, look for constants that refer to column names in one of the provider's data tables. These should always be constants publicly defined by the provider.
  • Test all the URIs offered by your provider. Your provider may offer several URIs, each one referring to a different aspect of the data. The Note Pad sample, for example, features a provider that offers one URI for retrieving a list of notes, another for retrieving an individual note by it's database ID, and a third for displaying notes in a live folder.
  • Test invalid URIs: Your unit tests should deliberately call the provider with an invalid URI, and look for errors. Good provider design is to throw an IllegalArgumentException for invalid URIs.
• Test the standard provider interactions: Most providers offer six access methods: query, insert, delete, update, getType, and onCreate(). Your tests should verify that all of these methods work. These are described in more detail in the topic Content Providers.
• Test business logic: Don't forget to test the business logic that your provider should enforce. Business logic includes handling of invalid values, financial or arithmetic calculations, elimination or combining of duplicates, and so forth. A content provider does not have to have business logic, because it may be implemented by activities that modify the data. If the provider does implement business logic, you should test it.

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ProviderTestCase2

ProviderTestCase2

You test a provider with a subclass of ProviderTestCase2. This base class extends AndroidTestCase, so it provides the JUnit testing framework as well as Android-specific methods for testing application permissions. The most important feature of this class is its initialization, which creates the isolated test environment.
The initialization is done in the constructor for ProviderTestCase2, which subclasses call in their own constructors. The ProviderTestCase2 constructor creates an IsolatedContext object that allows file and database operations but stubs out other interactions with the Android system. The file and database operations themselves take place in a directory that is local to the device or emulator and has a special prefix.
The constructor then creates a MockContentResolver to use as the resolver for the test. The MockContentResolver class is described in detail in the section Mock object classes.
Lastly, the constructor creates an instance of the provider under test. This is a normal ContentProvider object, but it takes all of its environment information from the IsolatedContext, so it is restricted to working in the isolated test environment. All of the tests done in the test case class run against this isolated object.

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