Easy peasy emails from SoapUI test cases to you

As a sophomore-level programming autodidact, I’m on an ongoing quest to bootstrap my test automation with SmartBear‘s venerable SoapUI. You can script SoapUI as heavily as you want to with the Groovy programming language. Or you can use SoapUI’s built-in GUI elements to reduce your programming work. For example, it can be a simple matter to let SoapUI consume your project WSDL and build out a request for you… and then display the incoming response in an easy-to-read form. Or you can use groovy-wslite to start you off on the same road, but it may take you longer to write the code yourself and might not yield you any richer results.

I really wanted SoapUI to email me a simple text message when a test ended. I’d already written and tested a Groovy class that used Apache Commons’ multipart email capabilities. However, I wasn’t sure how to use that class in SoapUI. After some Googling and experimenting, here’s how I got the whole thing working today.

1. I pointed SoapUI’s script library to the folder that contained my .groovy file with the class definition.* The sixth entry on the right in the image below takes a folder location.
   
2. I dropped the Apache commons.email jar into $SoapUI_home/bin/ext, otherwise known as the bin/ext directory in your SoapUI installation folder.  (Hat tip to Saurabh Gupta for this pointer.) I would imagine that putting it into $SoapUI_home/lib would work just as well, since that’s where the SoapUI installer puts a lot of the other Apache libraries.
3. For this test case, I wanted to record all my pass/fails and email myself at the end. So I put the following code into the setup script for the test case. The setup script window is visible at the bottom of the test case GUI in SoapUI.

   context.scriptResultsList = [] // List to hold pass/fails
   context.email // to be initialized later

4. Later in the test case, a Groovy script checks one XML file against another and records “PASS” if they’re identical, “FAIL” if not, and adds the “PASS” or “FAIL” string as a list item to the scriptResultsList context variable defined in the test case setup script.

   if (xmlDiff.identical()) {
      scriptResult = 'PASS'  
    }
    else {
      scriptResult = 'FAIL'
   }
   context.scriptResultsList << scriptResult

5. In the teardown script for the test case, I call my email class by attaching it to the context.email variable I created in the setup script. I send an email whose text depends on whether any of my test cases failed. I could attach a results file with a little more work.

   if ( context.scriptResultsList.find {it == 'FAIL'} ) {
   context.email = new ApacheMultiPartEmail("", "", "", 
   "Failure: SoapUI Regression Test", "At least one of your 
   test runs failed. Check detailed results.", 
   "recipient@blarg.net")
   }
   else {
   context.email = new ApacheMultiPartEmail("", "", "", 
   "Pass: SoapUI Regression Test", 
   "None of your test runs failed.", 
   "recipient@blarg.net")
   }

* Here’s my email class definition, which closely resembles the example in the Apache Commons online docs. It was written to send emails via an Exchange SMTP server. Note that Apache Commons also offers a SimpleEmail class that would have worked just as well for this limited purpose.

import org.apache.commons.*;
public class ApacheMultiPartEmail {
public ApacheMultiPartEmail(attPath, attDescription, attName, msgSubject, msgMessage, msgRecipient) {
if (attPath != '' && attDescription != '' && attName != '') {
EmailAttachment attachment = new EmailAttachment();
attachment.setPath(attPath);
attachment.setDisposition(EmailAttachment.ATTACHMENT);
attachment.setDescription(attDescription);
attachment.setName(attName);
email.attach(attachment);
}

Email email = new MultiPartEmail();
email.setHostName("smtp.yourhostname.org"); // I hardcode this
email.setSmtpPort(yoursmtpport); // also hardcoded in the class definition
email.setFrom("desiredSenderEmailAddress"); //I hardcode this value in the class always to send the message from me. You could pass it in as a parameter too. 
email.setSubject(msgSubject);
email.setMsg(msgMessage);
email.addTo(msgRecipient);

email.send();
}
}