Can Ant categorise JUnit tests based on inheritance hierarchy?

Question

I'm working with a legacy project that has:

• Pure unit tests
• Integration tests (slow to run; have all sorts of nasty dependencies)

I'm looking for the simplest way to run both types of tests separately with Ant.

I wonder if there's a way to have Ant automatically recognise these two categories based on the inheritance hierarchy:

StringUtilsTest extends TestCase  // "pure unit test"

vs

ProductionDBTest extends AbstractTransactionalTesterBase // "integration test"

There's a hierarchy of abstract superclasses that integration tests are based on, but they all come down to some Spring test classes and ultimately AbstractSpringContextTests which extends junit.framework.TestCase.

In other words, can I distinguish, in Ant, tests that (indirectly) extend AbstractSpringContextTests and tests that directly extend TestCase? Or would I have to manually go through the tests and e.g. put them in separate Categories or TestSuites? (There are many tests so I wouldn't want to do that.)

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Resolution: I tried Sean's (very promising) approach, but couldn't get it working (easily). So I ended up going through the tests semi-manually after all, annotating the pure ones (which was the smaller group) using a setup described in this SO question, and running them with Ant like this. (Note that writing a custom TestRunner is not necessary.)

Answer 1

The solution we used for categorizing our JUnit tests was using a custom annotation. You can then use a custom TestRunner with that which can be given a flag or argument as to which test types to run, or all of them.

Sorry, no example code but creating annotations and a TestRunner is pretty basic, give it a try!

Answer 2

The simple way is to name your test classes ending with the test type

Lets say we were testing dates.

DateTest.java (Quick normal tests)

DateSysTest.java (Long running )

Then in there were two targets one the quick unit tests has

   <batchtest todir="your dir">
      <!--Run unit tests for each class with suffix Test, unless it is SysTest or StressTest-->
      <fileset dir="${src}/test"
        includes="**/*Test.java"
        excludes="**/*StressTest.java **/*SysTest.java" />
    </batchtest>

You then create a few ant targets, one for quick tests one for sys tests and one do them all.. Something like that. That is to say if you can rename your test classes.