[unittest] Run setUp only once

[Nikolaus Rath]

Jean-Paul Calderone <exarkun at divmod.com> writes:
> On Tue, 29 Jul 2008 19:26:09 +0200, Nikolaus Rath <nikolaus at rath.org> wrote:
>>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?
>>
>
> Eh sorry, you're right, the above is broken. `setUpResult` should be
> a class attribute instead of an instance attribute.

Yeah, well, I guess that would work. But to me this looks really more
like a nasty hack.. isn't there a proper solution?

Best,

   -Nikolaus

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