Automated unit testing of channels

[maltmann]

We are new to Mirth and trying to understand best practices around software development. What strategies do people use for testing the channel definitions and transformation code that they develop?

Currently we use maven and Jenkins/Hudson to perform automated builds and tests of our java source. As we start defining Mirth channels and the logic for transformations, I would like to have some automated junit tests that verify that the transforms and channels behave as intended. Are there good ways to launch Mirth as part of a unit test, feed it a channel definition, and then some input and verify the output?

Thanks, Michael

[narupley]

Generally the way people do it is to have one or more completely separate testing environments, each with their own instance of Mirth Connect. Before rolling a channel out in production, we generally do extensive testing on the Test environment, where we can receive pre-live data from clients, send pre-live data to clients, or anything else we need to do.