Instancio Fixture Builder

What is Instancio

Instancio is a library for instantiating and populating objects with random data, making your tests more dynamic. Each test run is against a new set of inputs.

While testing, you’ll want your data to be as random as possible. Instancio provides you with a lot of powerful tools to achieve this, without losing the realism of your test data.

To learn more about instancio. Visit their website

Keep your tests clean!

While Instancio is a very powerful tool to generate test data, you’ll probably want to keep your tests as clean as possible.

One way to do this, is to move the instantiation of your test objects to what’s often called test fixtures. This is where instancio-fixture-builder comes in!

Very often you’re working with immutable objects, so you can’t change any values once your object is created. If you require an object with some specific values (while the other attributes are initialized with random values), you’ll find yourself creating loads of fixture methods with different sets of parameters.

Builder pattern to the rescue!

I had the idea to solve this method overload with a simple solution. What if I introduced the builder pattern to my fixtures? It took me a few iterations to get me to the flexible solution I have now, but in my opinion it is something very useful. My entire team is using this pattern right now!

Installation

Maven

Include the following dependency in your pom.xml

<dependency>
    <groupId>io.github.wouter-bauweraerts</groupId>
    <artifactId>instancio-fixture-builder</artifactId>
    <version>5.2.1</version>
</dependency>

Check the Maven Central Repository for the most recent version. There you can also find how to include it with different build systems.

How does it work?

1. Create a class for your fixture

    Example: SomePojo class --> SomePojoFixtures
   

2. Create a static inner class that extends AbstractFixtureBuilder.

    The AbstractFixtureBuilder requires 2 generic parameters.
        - TYPEBUILDER: the (POJO) class that you want to initialize with (random) data
        - SELF: The classname of the AbstractFixtureBuilder subclass you are writing. 
          This is required to be able to return itself.
   

3. There are a few things you’ll have to do if you have a POJO that you want to create a fixture for. First of all, you’ll have to learn how to create Instancio Models (A model in Instancio is a definition of rules that Instancio has to follow when generating the random data to initialize the object)

4. For every parameter that you need to be able to control, add a method to set the specific value of to ignore the field (set to NULL)

5. Implement the abstract methods from AbstractFixtureBuilder
   • self method: returns the current instance of a AbstractFixtureBuilder implementation

       public ConcreteFixtureBuilderImplementation self() {
        return this;
       }
     

   • build method: triggers the actual instantiation and returns the created instance.

     public SomePojo build() {
        return buildInternal(MODEL_CREATED_IN_STEP_3);
     }
     

6. Provide a static method in the wrapper class that facilitates the creation of the fixture builder without having to instantiate the fixtures class. Return a new instance of the inner class.

Check the full example here

Releases

Initial release: 5.0.2. For simplicity, I use the same versioning as Instancio.

Version	Release date
5.0.2	Sep 27 2024
5.2.1	Dec 18 2024