User
===

The documentation for this plug-in can be found at http://testng.org/doc/eclipse.html


Developer
======

In Eclipse, select "Import / Existing Project" and point the dialog to
this directory. Then you can just create a new Eclipse application
launch to run the plug-in.

The runner view is called TestRunnerViewPart and it receives the test
results from the remote TestNG process. Every new result is passed to
postTestResult() which in turn, passes this result to each tab by
calling their updateTestResult() method.

The tab's logic is in AbstractTab, which calculates a unique id for
each test result and then either creates or updates the corresponding
node in the tree. Each node is associated with an instance of an
ITreeItem (store in its data map) which contains all the necessary
information to display the label, its image, etc...

The tests are run by a subclass of TestNG called RemoteTestNG. The
Eclipse client forks the RemoteTestNG process and adds itself as a
listener. The difference is that this listener will pass the test
results over the network using a serialization based protocol that can
be found in the strprotocol package.

The plug-in understands two system properties, which you can define as
VM arguments in the launch dialog:

-Dtestng.eclipse.verbose

This will cause both the Eclipse client and RemoteTestNG to issue a
more verbose output.

-Dtestng.eclipse.debug

Use this flag if you need to debug and break into RemoteTestNG. In
this case, you need to start the RemoteTestNG process youself as a
regular Java application and with the "-debug" flag. Then start the
Eclipse client with this system property, and then the two processes
will communicate on a hardcoded port, 12345 (as opposed to the random
port which they usually use) and through a hardcoded XML file
("${java.io.tmpdir}/testng-customsuite.xml").

Now that you launched both processes yourself, you can set up break
point and inspect variables on either.


Protocol
=====

When a new run is launched, TestNGLaunchConfigurationDelegate creates
a VMRunnerConfigurationClient that launches RemoteTestNG with a host,
a port and an XML file. Then Eclipse listens on this host and port.

The base class that provides the basic listening functions is
AbstractRemoteTestRunnerClient, which is defined in TestNG. The
Eclipse plug-in subclasses this class with an
EclipseTestRunnerClient. TestRunnerViewPart creates an instance of
this class and then calls startListening() on it.

Whenever a new message is received, AbstractRemoteTestRunnerClient
looks up the type of the message and then calls the subclass's
corresponding method:

SUITE -> notifyStart(GenericMessage)
TEST -> notifySuiteEvents(SuiteMessage)
TEST_RESULT -> notifyTestEvents(TestMessage)
other -> notifyResultEvents(TestResultMessage)

RemoteTestNG starts by opening a connection to the port passed on the
command line and when it succeeds, runs the suites and uses listeners
to send messages to the Eclipse client.

All these messages implement IStringMessage and they are of several kinds:

GenericMessage: general information message (such as an initial notification of the number of suites/tests)
TestMessage
SuiteMessage
TestResultMessage