I needed a Junit Formatter

Currently I am doing my testing using PHPSpec, and Continuous Integration using Jenkins CI. As PHPSpec doesn’t currently have Junit.xml output format the XUnit plugin for Jenkins cannot show the test results, so I set out to create a Junit Formatter for PHPSpec.

There was already a feature request for a Junit Formatter on the PHPSpec github page. And a user named xenji (who also made the request) had started to work on it, so I decided to check it out. I pulled the changes from his repo and ran my tests with -f j, which indicates that I want the output in junit format and I got a plain text result. So I checked the source and it was just a skeleton mostly. As I needed the Junit format really soon I started to hack on this.

So I hacked it

In my hurry, I forgot to create a new branch for this feature so all the commits ended up on the develop branch. Will be difficult to pull them out separately.

When I thought about it, the Junit formatter would be the same as the Html formatter, it’s just the tags and stuff that would change. So I checked the Html formatter and it was using the observer pattern to hook into three events, SuiteStarted, SuiteFinished and RunExample. I moved these events to the Progress formatter which is the base class of Html and Junit formatter and used those methods to inject the correct output.

The next thing I needed was the actual format for the Junit.xml accepted by Jenkins. My first clue was from this stackoverflow question. It had the everything correct except one minor detail. The ‘classname’ attribute in the ‘testcase’ tag was supposed to be ‘class’, which I didn’t know until much later. So obviously Jenkins didn’t - couldn’t - accept this file to show the test results.

Not realizing, this I went on searching for a true format and came upon an XSD file for the Junit.xml file. I ran

xmllint --noout --schema junit.xsd junit.xml

My next idea was foolproof, compare the phpspec junit output with phpunit output. So I started to imitate the phpunit format one attribute at a time. At the end I had the following attributes added; file, time, line and assertions. But the only thing I needed to change from the original one from the stackoverflow question was ‘classname’ attribute to ‘class’. After it worked with ‘class’ I removed the file, time, line, and assertions and it still worked with Jenkins. So I have kept the lines to add ‘file’, ‘time’, ‘line’, ‘assertions’ commented until phpspec makes those information available to the formatter.

Enjoy the new Junit formatter at https://github.com/andho/phpspec. The code is in the development branch so be careful using it in production although I am doing exactly that. I’ll try to separate the changes into a separate branch and send a pull request to phpspec repo.