Overview

dbUnit offers two ways to wire its setup/teardown lifecycle into a test class:

• Composition — a test class holds an IDatabaseTester field, constructed directly or dependency-injected.
• Inheritance — a test class extends DBTestCase (or one of its three subclasses below), which owns an IDatabaseTester internally.

Composition is the preferred style — it doesn’t compete for your test class’s one available superclass, and fits naturally with dependency injection (Spring or otherwise). See the IDatabaseTester guide for the interface hierarchy, lifecycle, and a complete example. Inheritance remains fully supported for tests that prefer it, or that predate this recommendation; see Migrating to IDatabaseTester if you want to convert an existing DBTestCase subclass.

On JUnit 5/6 (Jupiter), composition users can also skip writing the @BeforeEach/@AfterEach lifecycle calls entirely — see DbUnitExtension.

Whichever style you choose, PrepAndExpectedTestCase is usually a better starting point than driving either one directly — it packages prep/verify/cleanup behind runTest(), needs no parent class, and works with both styles (it holds an IDatabaseTester, so it composes either way).

Inheritance: DBTestCase and Its Subclasses

DBTestCase extends the top-level DatabaseTestCase. A template method, getDataSet(), is required to be implemented, returning the dataset for the test. DBTestCase relies on an IDatabaseTester to do its work; the default configuration uses PropertiesBasedJdbcDatabaseTester, which locates DriverManager configuration in System properties. The simplest way to configure it is in the constructor of your test class. You may modify this behavior by overriding newDatabaseTester(), using one of the subclasses below or your own IDatabaseTester.

The following sample implementation returns a connection to an H2 in-memory database and an XML dataset:

public class SampleTest extends DBTestCase
{
    public SampleTest(String name)
    {
        super(name);
        System.setProperty(PropertiesBasedJdbcDatabaseTester.DBUNIT_DRIVER_CLASS, "org.h2.Driver");
        System.setProperty(PropertiesBasedJdbcDatabaseTester.DBUNIT_CONNECTION_URL, "jdbc:h2:mem:sample;DB_CLOSE_DELAY=-1");
        System.setProperty(PropertiesBasedJdbcDatabaseTester.DBUNIT_USERNAME, "sa");
        System.setProperty(PropertiesBasedJdbcDatabaseTester.DBUNIT_PASSWORD, "");
    }

    @Override
    protected IDataSet getDataSet() throws Exception
    {
        return new FlatXmlDataSetBuilder().build(new FileInputStream("dataset.xml"));
    }

    @BeforeEach
    @Override
    protected void setUp() throws Exception
    {
        super.setUp();
    }

    @AfterEach
    @Override
    protected void tearDown() throws Exception
    {
        super.tearDown();
    }
}

public class SampleTest extends DBTestCase
{
    ...
    @Override
    protected DatabaseOperation getSetUpOperation() throws Exception
    {
        return DatabaseOperation.REFRESH;
    }

    @Override
    protected DatabaseOperation getTearDownOperation() throws Exception
    {
        return DatabaseOperation.DELETE_ALL;
    }
    ...
}

public class SampleTest extends DBTestCase
{
    ...
    @Override
    protected void setUpDatabaseConfig(DatabaseConfig config)
    {
        config.setProperty(DatabaseConfig.PROPERTY_BATCH_SIZE, 97);
        config.setFeature(DatabaseConfig.FEATURE_BATCHED_STATEMENTS, true);
    }
    ...
}

General Notes

1. For additional examples, refer to the ITs for the specific test case.
2. To change the setup or teardown operation (e.g. change the teardown to org.dbunit.operation.DatabaseOperation.DELETE_ALL), set the setUpOperation or tearDownOperation property on the databaseTester — see Database Operations.
3. To set DatabaseConfig features/properties, one way is to extend the test case class and override the setUpDatabaseConfig(DatabaseConfig config) method from DatabaseTestCase, as shown above.