The documentation for this plug-in can be found at http://testng.org/doc/eclipse.html

Set the version number with scripts/set-version, e.g.:

scripts/set-version 6.8.22-SNAPSHOT

Using SNAPSHOT version numbers will generate UTC timestamped plugin-numbers, e.g. 6.8.22.201505030200 so you should only increase the version number if you are including a higher version of testng.jar.

Once the version is correct, build the Eclipse plug-in as follows:

mvn -e clean package

The update site package will be generated at testng-eclipse-update-site/target/site.zip

In Eclipse, select Import / Existing Project and point the dialog to this directory. Then you can just create a new Eclipse application launch to run the plug-in.

The runner view is called TestRunnerViewPart and it receives the test results from the remote TestNG process. Every new result is passed to postTestResult() which in turn, passes this result to each tab by calling their updateTestResult() method.

The tab's logic is in AbstractTab, which calculates a unique id for each test result and then either creates or updates the corresponding node in the tree. Each node is associated with an instance of an ITreeItem (store in its data map) which contains all the necessary information to display the label, its image, etc...

The tests are run by a subclass of TestNG called RemoteTestNG. The Eclipse client forks the RemoteTestNG process and adds itself as a listener. The difference is that this listener will pass the test results over the network using a serialization based protocol that can be found in the strprotocol package.

The plug-in understands two system properties, which you can define as VM arguments in the launch dialog:

-Dtestng.eclipse.verbose

This will cause both the Eclipse client and RemoteTestNG to issue a more verbose output.

-Dtestng.eclipse.debug

Use this flag if you need to debug and break into RemoteTestNG. In this case, you need to start the RemoteTestNG process youself as a regular Java application and with the "-debug" flag. Then start the Eclipse client with this system property, and then the two processes will communicate on a hardcoded port, 12345 (as opposed to the random port which they usually use) and through a hardcoded XML file ("${java.io.tmpdir}/testng-customsuite.xml").

Now that you launched both processes yourself, you can set up break point and inspect variables on either.

When a new run is launched, TestNGLaunchConfigurationDelegate creates a VMRunnerConfigurationClient that launches RemoteTestNG with a host, a port and an XML file. Then Eclipse listens on this host and port.

The base class that provides the basic listening functions is AbstractRemoteTestRunnerClient, which is defined in TestNG. The Eclipse plug-in subclasses this class with an EclipseTestRunnerClient. TestRunnerViewPart creates an instance of this class and then calls startListening() on it.

Whenever a new message is received, AbstractRemoteTestRunnerClient looks up the type of the message and then calls the subclass's corresponding method:

TEST -> notifySuiteEvents(SuiteMessage)
TEST_RESULT -> notifyTestEvents(TestMessage)
other -> notifyResultEvents(TestResultMessage)```

RemoteTestNG starts by opening a connection to the port passed on the
command line and when it succeeds, runs the suites and uses listeners
to send messages to the Eclipse client.

All these messages implement IStringMessage and they are of several kinds:

GenericMessage: general information message (such as an initial notification of the number of suites/tests)

- TestMessage
- SuiteMessage
- TestResultMessage