Overview

By default, dbUnit immediately fails when the first data difference is found. Since release 2.4 it is possible to register a custom FailureHandler which lets you specify what kind of exception is thrown and how differences are handled, instead of the default fail-fast behavior.

FailureHandler combines two roles:

• DifferenceListener — handle(Difference diff) is called for each mismatch found during a comparison.
• FailureFactory — builds the exception/error to throw for a given failure.

Collecting All Differences Instead Of Failing Fast

DiffCollectingFailureHandler is a FailureHandler that does not throw on a data mismatch — it collects every Difference (each exposing the expected/actual table, row index, column name, and expected/actual value) into a list you can evaluate afterwards, so you see every mismatch in one run instead of fixing them one assertion failure at a time.

IDataSet dataSet = getDataSet();
DiffCollectingFailureHandler myHandler = new DiffCollectingFailureHandler();

// invoke the assertion with the custom handler
Assertion.assertEquals(dataSet.getTable("TEST_TABLE"),
                       dataSet.getTable("TEST_TABLE_WITH_WRONG_VALUE"),
                       myHandler);

// evaluate the results and throw a failure if you wish
List<Difference> diffList = myHandler.getDiffList();
Difference diff = diffList.get(0);

See Equality Comparison and ValueComparer Comparison for the comparison methods a FailureHandler plugs into.