BerrySync - Unit Testing in Blackberry Apps

Pains
Building Berrysync from the ground up hasn't come without it's challenges. Most notably as of recent has been our incorporation of test driven development, for many people that brings JUnit to mind. To my surprise JUnit without including its dependencies will not natively run on the BlackBerry Java core, and even more interesting is the fact that JUnit comes bundled in the BlackBerry Developer Eclipse!

Thanks to some googling and blog posts lost in my browser history I came across this awesome tool called BUnit. It seems to be the only reliable way to unit test inside a BlackBerry app.

Using BUnit in Your Project
You'll need to define an alternate entry point to your application and add some logic to the App's entry point, here are the steps:

1. In BlackBerry_App_Descriptor.xml -> click Alternate entry points
2. Click add provide a name, click ok
3. Click on what you just added and provide an Application Argument and/or an icon
4. Open MyApp, and provide this logic (eg. Application Argument = bunit)

    public static void main(String[] args){
        if (args != null && args.length > 0 && args[0].equals("bunit")){
            TestRunner tester = new TestRunner();
            tester.enterEventDispatcher();
        }else{
            MyApp theApp = new MyApp();       
            theApp.enterEventDispatcher();
        }
    }

Two entry points allows this, where BerrySync is our application and B-unit is the unit tester


Tips On Usage
Now I assume the limitations of BUnit and the major benefits of JUnit come from java Reflection. Which you guessed it, isn't included in the BlackBerry JRE. Sooo much to my disappointment in each test suite you need to manually specify the number of tests, and later on invoke them in a switch. On top of that you'll need to add your suites to runner manually.

A snippet of my test suite: http://pastebin.com/mq9QzpkW


I also had to add a few Assertion functions, graciously BUnit provided the file to place them in.

assertEquals(String test, byte[] expected, byte[] actual)
assertNotEquals(String test, byte[] expected, byte[] actual)

here they are too! http://pastebin.com/H3R69XC6

ScreenShot
<- Berrysync's unit tester running as is