[unittest] Run setUp only once

[Nikolaus Rath]

Jean-Paul Calderone <exarkun at divmod.com> writes:
> On Tue, 29 Jul 2008 16:35:55 +0200, Nikolaus Rath <nikolaus at rath.org> wrote:
>>Hello,
>>
>>I have a number of conceptually separate tests that nevertheless need
>>a common, complicated and expensive setup.
>>
>>Unfortunately, unittest runs the setUp method once for each defined
>>test, even if they're part of the same class as in
>>
>>class TwoTests(unittest.TestCase):
>>    def setUp(self):
>>        # do something very time consuming
>>
>>    def testOneThing(self):
>>
>>
>>    def testADifferentThing(self):
>>
>>
>>which would call setUp twice.
>>
>>
>>Is there any way to avoid this, without packing all the unrelated
>>tests into one big function?
>>
>
>    class TwoTests(unittest.TestCase):
>        setUpResult = None
>
>        def setUp(self):
>            if self.setUpResult is None:
>                self.setUpResult = computeIt()
>
>        ...
>
> There are plenty of variations on this pattern.


But at least this variation doesn't work, because unittest apparently
also creates two separate TwoTests instances for the two tests. Isn't
there some way to convince unittest to reuse the same instance instead
of trying to solve the problem in the test code itself?


Best,

   -Nikolaus

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