XSpec Plugin for Maven

A very simple plugin for Maven that will execute your XSpec tests as part of the verify phase of your Maven build, reports are generated and if any tests fail the build will be failed. The XSpec Maven plugin is licensed under the BSD license. The plugin bundles aspects of the XSpec processor implementaion (written in XSLT) from http://code.google.com/p/xspec/ which is released under the MIT license.

Note at present only XSpec tests written in XSLT are supported. It should not be too difficult to add support for XQuery as well for a future release.

By default the plugin expects to find your tests in src/test/xspec and both XML and HTML reports will be generated into target/xspec-reports. In addition the XSLT compiled version of your XSpecs will be placed in target/xspec-reports/xslt for reference if you need to debug your tests.

Goals

The plugin binds to the verify phase by default and there is only one goal: run-xspec. The plugin has been published to Maven Central and as such using the plugin should simply be a matter of declaring the plugin in your build configuration inside your pom.xml:

Plugin declaration

<build>
	<plugins>
		<plugin>
			<groupId>uk.org.adamretter.maven</groupId>
			<artifactId>xspec-maven-plugin</artifactId>
			<version>1.3</version>
			<executions>
				<execution>
					<phase>verify</phase>
					<goals>
						<goal>run-xspec</goal>
					</goals>
				</execution>
			</executions>
		</plugin>
	</plugins>
</build>

Configuration

There are several configuration options that you may specify:

• xspecCompiler This is the path to the XSpec Compiler XSLT i.e. the compiler/generate-xspec-tests.xsl as provided by the de-facto XSpec processor implementation. By default the XSpec compiler bundled in the XSpec Plugin in used, however this configuration option allows you to specify a custom version.

• xspecReporter This is the path to the XSpec Reporter XSLT i.e. the reporter/format-xspec-report.xsl as provided by the de-facto XSpec processor implementation. By default the XSpec reporter bundled in the XSpec Plugin in used, however this configuration option allows you to specify a custom version.

• testDir This is the path to a folder containing your XSpec tests. The tests are expected to be named such that they end with the file extension .xspec. By default the folder src/test/xspec is used.

• excludes You may specify one or more filenames (or partial filenames), which when matached against XSpec paths in testDir are excluded from being executed.

• reportDir This is the path to a folder where the XSpec tests reports will be stored. By default the folder target/xspec-reports is used.

FAQ

• Where should I put my XSLT?

You can put it anywhere you like, although within src/ would make the most sense! We would suggest keeping your XSLT files in src/main/resources/. If you do that, then to reference the XSLT from your XSpec, you should set the @template attribute use relative path to that folder. For example, given src/main/resources/some.xslt and src/test/xspec/some.xspec, your some.xspec would reference some.xslt like so:

<x:description xmlns:x="http://www.jenitennison.com/xslt/xspec"
  stylesheet="../../main/resources/some.xslt">
  
  ...

• How can I skip the XSpec tests?

XSpec will adhere to the Maven option -DskipTests. If you are doing this in a forked execution such as that used by the Maven Release plugin you may also have to use the Maven option -Darguments="-DskipTests".