Test Units (Cases and Suites) in Boost.Test do not capture __FILE__ and __LINE__ at declaration point making it impossible to provide source file linking using external test management tools

[Jamie Allsop <ja11sop@…>]

We currently use ​Bitten as our continuous integration tool. We also use Boost.Test for all our unit tests. As Bitten integrates with ​Trac, which also provides the ability to browse our source repository, we want to be able to augment our test reports with links from test cases back to the source they appear in. In order to provide this capability we need to patch boost test so that FILE and LINE are captured in the test case and test suite macros. The patch attached to this ticket adds this capability.

Once this information is available it becomes easy to extract this information from the test output. We use human readable output but this works equally well with the XML output.

This can then be used by any number of continuous integration tools to provide much better test reports. In our case we turn each test case and test suite name into a link directly to the file and line in our source tree where the test unit was defined. This makes linking reports to actual source much more intuitive.

This is a relatively simple patch and I have another follow on patch that further enhances the reporting capability of Boost.Test with a view to easier integration to third party tools. I'll comment back with the ticket number when it is created. We currently use a similar patch to the attached with our development code with boost 1.48. The attached patch is against trunk.

[Jamie Allsop <ja11sop@…>]

boost_test_test_unit_file_and_line.diff

[Jamie Allsop <ja11sop@…>]

These patches, attached to:

#7397

Boost.Test, since boost 1.48 is using the deprecated Boost.Timer class

#7410

Test Units (Cases and Suites) in Boost.Test do not capture __FILE__ and __LINE__ at declaration point making it impossible to provide source file linking using external test management tools

#7417

Detailed test status is not available in the Boost.Test log (status, assertions, passed) and so live test case status cannot be tracked

...taken together allow for sophisticated test tools to be built on top of the Boost.Test output.

[jaredgrubb@…]

The patch looks reasonable. My only comment is that it changes the test_case constructor, which could cause migration issues for anyone that may have subclassed or written other macros. Might be better to keep the original constructor around and just fill in some dummy values for file/line if that happens to get called.

[Jamie Allsop <ja11sop@…>]

Actually that's a good point - some sort of dummy values would probably work well. The call to the creation of the Master Test Suite could then either use that constructor or actually be created using __FILE__ and __LINE__ since technically that is where the master test suite is created.

[Gennadiy Rozental]

Applied in trunk with some modifications. Thank you for the submission