Rollback Database after running Selenium GUI tests

Question

I am using Selenium GUI tests in a Java Web Application. Since these tests are actually client, how can we rollback database after running a test?

Answer 1

What you're after is called Fixture Teardown Patterns. Since you need to keep track of all resources that are created in a test and automatically destroy/free them during Teardown. I obviously don't know your framework, but for this case

rollback database after running a test

a good candidate is the Inline Teardown. It includes teardown logic at the end of the Test Method immediately after the result verification. Like so:

Answer 2

My guess is that you can't 'roll back' the database since web applications typically commit transactions between requests.

You'll need to implement your own custom rollback. Perhaps you could create a new user for each test and remove any changes made by this user after the test. Or maybe you want to implement the command pattern.

You might also find a cascading delete helpful

Answer 3

Thank you for your suggestions. I decided to use mysqldump for this purpose. Within Ant, Backup and restore the test-database before and after each batch-test.

Answer 4

Lately I attended a talk about docker. The speaker was creating a docker container with a mysql database for demonstration purposes. I was immediately thinking about how to use this for integration testing as you can create a clean database instance with very little effort.

I was searching if there are already some best practices and found those to websites

• TestContainers - pay attention to the Temporary database containers link
• Tutorial – Docker, JPA and Testing - a complete example

I´m in the phase of evaluating on how to integrate this but I´m confident this is what I (and hopefully you) was looking for. Workflow would be:

1. Test execution
2. Start docker container from image with empty
3. Fill database with master data (if necessary)
4. Run test
5. Throw docker container away