We can use data pipes to write data driven tests in Spock. A data pipe (<<) is fed by a data provider. We can use Collection objects as data provider, but also String objects and any class that implements the Iterable interface. We can write our own data provider class if we implement the Iterable interface.

In the following sample code we want to test the female property of the User class. We have the class MultilineProvider that implements the Iterable interface. The provider class accepts a multiline String value and returns the tokenized result of each line in each iteration.

package com.mrhaki.spock

@Grab('org.spockframework:spock-core:0.7-groovy-2.0')
import spock.lang.*

class ProviderSampleSpec extends Specification {

    @Unroll("Gender #gender for #name is #description")
    def "check if user is female or male based on gender value"() {
        given:
        def userData = '''
            1;mrhaki;M;false
            2;Britt;F;true'''

        expect:
        new User(name: name, gender: gender).female == Boolean.valueOf(expected)

        where:
        [_, name, gender, expected] << new MultilineProvider(source: userData)

        // Extra data variable to be used in
        // @Unroll description.
        description = expected ? 'female' : 'not female'
    }

}

/**
 * Class under test.
 */
class User {
    String name, gender

    Boolean isFemale() {
        gender == 'F'
    }
}

/**
 * Class implements Iterable interface so
 * it can be used as data provider.
 */
class MultilineProvider implements Iterable {
    def source
    def lines
    def separator = ';'

    private int counter

    /**
     * Set multiline String as source
     * and transform to a List of String
     * values and assign to the lines
     * property.
     */
    void setSource(source) {
        this.source = source.stripIndent()
        lines = this.source.readLines()
    }

    @Override
    Iterator iterator() {
        [
            hasNext: {
                counter < lines.size()
            },
            next: {
                lines[counter++].tokenize(separator)
            }
        ] as Iterator
    }
}

Code written with Spock 0.7-groovy-2 and Groovy 2.3.3.

Original article

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