09 July 2009 - 3.0 |
What is a Composite Project?
Behind the somewhat bewildering terminology lies a very simple concept; Composite Projects are soapUI projects saved to enable Team Collaboration.
Let's explain more in detail. Normally a soapUI Project is saved as one xml file. This has its advantages; you have only one file to consider and that file contains all information about that project. It also has some disadvantages; collaboration and joint team test development is very hard because synchronization is very hard to do.
When working in a Team in a project you often come to the situation where you have one person updating one test and another person a second test. If you only have one project file this is impossible to do simultaneously and hard to do by synching the test manually.
In comes Composite Projects; composite SoapUI projects are saved as a file system, which means updating, changing, or committing parts of projects, like a TestCase, are much easier to do.
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A Composite SoapUI project is saved in directory with the project name. It contains separate directories for each Interface, TestSuite, MockService and File Settings.xml. File Settings is used for storing where settings and data for the project itself. You can see it as the meta file. Each interface directory contains one file named interface settings.xml file and for each operation one xml file named by it. The TestSuite directory contains one settings.xml file and one xml file for each TestCase named by it. Mock service directory contains one settings.xml and one xml file for each MockOperation named by it.
Creating a soapUI composite project is easy. In project properties you can find a property to set ;Composite Project that can be true or false. Setting it to true will make your soapUI Project save in composite form (projects that have set Project Password can not be composite).
When renaming elements in a project, ie Interfaces, Operations/Resources, TestSuite, TestCase, and more, corresponding elements in the composite file system will be renamed if there is no file or directory with the same name, otherwise soapUI will show a warning message. Deleting element means removing them from the file system. Through the Projet-popup sub-menu Composite Actions, it is possible to save or reload elements.
For both TestSuites and TestCases it is possible to export and import them from their containing items popup menus; specify a target/source folder as desired. Please note that these are not "compatible" or the same as TestSuites and TestCases in a composite project; this is merely an alternative way for non-Pro users to share Test items between projects/people.