Testing Trees

Working on parsers a lot recently, I have to write quite a bunch of tedious unit tests. Each of these tests analyses an EMF AST model which is the output of the parser. It checks if all nodes are at the right location and if all properties are set correctly. The tests look awful and debugging is a nightmare.

Using Xtext, it is quite easy to create a DSL for tree comparison. I can now describe expected tree results as

Extension {
name=Identifier(value='foo')
params=[
DeclaredParameter {
name=Identifier(value='this')
type=Identifier(value='Object')
},
DeclaredParameter {
name=Identifier(value='that')
type=Identifier(value='Object')
}]
}

where Extension, Identifier and DeclaredParameter are EClasses, name,params and type are EReferences and value is a attribute.

Writing such a DSL and an interpreter doesn't take you a day and will save you a lot of time and mental sanity in the future.