Arquillian Persistence Extension was created to help you writing tests where persistence layer is involved. Inspired by great framework called Unitils, it brings bunch of annotations to help you deal with the underlying data storage.

Arquillian Persistence Extension comes with following features:

• Wrapping each test in the seperated transaction (with commit(default) or rollback at the end).
• Seeding database using DBUnit with XML, XLS and YAML supported as data sets format.
• Comparing database state at the end of the test using given data sets.

Currently tested on Glassfish 3.1 Embedded and JBoss AS 7.0.2 Final (managed).

Enough talking, let's see it in action!

@RunWith(Arquillian.class)
public class UserPersistenceTest
{

  @Deployment
  public static Archive<?> createDeploymentPackage()
  {
      return ShrinkWrap.create(JavaArchive.class, "test.jar")
                       .addPackage(UserAccount.class.getPackage())
                       .addPackages(true, "org.fest") // FEST Assert is not part of Arquillian JUnit
                       .addAsManifestResource(EmptyAsset.INSTANCE, "beans.xml")
                       .addAsManifestResource("test-persistence.xml", "persistence.xml");
  }

  @PersistenceContext
  EntityManager em;

  @Test
  @UsingDataSet("datasets/users.yml")
  @ShouldMatchDataSet("datasets/expected-users.yml")
  public void shouldChangeUserPassword() throws Exception
  {
      // given
      String expectedPassword = "LexLuthor";
      UserAccount user = em.find(UserAccount.class, 2L);

      // when
      user.setPassword("LexLuthor");
      em.merge(user);

      // then
      assertThat(user.getPassword()).isEqualTo(expectedPassword);
  }
}

There are just two things which are different from the standard Arquillian test - @UsingDataSet and @ShouldMatchDataSet annotations. Former seeds the database using file in YAML format, and latter verifies database state using given file.

This example is taken from integration tests written for this project, so feel free to have a closer look. But it's that easy! And there's more to come!