When do I use the TestFixtureSetUp attribute instead of a default constructor?

Question

The NUnit documentation doesn\'t tell me when to use a method with a TestFixtureSetup and when to do the setup in the constructor.

public class MyTe         


        

Answer 1

One thing you can't do with [TestFixtureSetup] that you can do in the constructor is receive parameters from the [TestFixture] .

If you want to parameterise your test fixture, then you will have to use the constructor for at least some of the set-up. So far, I've only used this for integration tests, e.g. for testing a data access layer with multiple data providers:

[TestFixture("System.Data.SqlClient",
  "Server=(local)\\SQLEXPRESS;Initial Catalog=MyTestDatabase;Integrated Security=True;Pooling=False"))]
[TestFixture("System.Data.SQLite", "Data Source=MyTestDatabase.s3db")])]
internal class MyDataAccessLayerIntegrationTests
{
    MyDataAccessLayerIntegrationTests(
        string dataProvider,
        string connectionString)
    {
        ...
    }
}