Test Driven .NET Development with FitNesse

Basic FIT fixtures use cell operators to understand what you write in table cells. For example, the default cell operator just interprets the data literally, but the symbol parsing operator looks up the symbol value and uses this instead of the cell contents.

Non-standard cell operators allow you to write comparisons more easily. For example, sometimes you don't care about the whole string, but just want to check the last few characters. CompareEndsWith allows you to specify the expected results by prefixing the ending with two dots.

CompareEndsWith is not in the list of default operators, so it must be loaded manually. To load a non-standard operator, create a ConfigurationSetup table. Add a row with just the keyword Service and then rows with the keywords add operator in the first cell and the class name in second cell. Here is an example:

!|configuration setup|
|service| 
|add operator|CompareEndsWith|

				
|String Fixture|
|field|field?|
|Ford Prefect|..ect|
|Marvin|..vin|

Non-standard operators have to be loaded on demand because they can alter the expected behaviour of other functions. When CompareEndsWith is active, two dots at the beginning of a string have a special meaning and they are no longer interpreted literally. To avoid problems, you might want to unload non-standard operators when the test is over. To do this, use the remove operator keywords in the ConfigurationSetup

Here are some other interesting non-standard cell operators you can use: