The execution environment for a suite of tests can be controlled by a suite configuration file. This is a way to consolidate configuration information into one place and to remove it from business-facing story tests. We specify the file in the command line for the fitSharp Runner with a -c switch:

c:\program files\fitsharp\runner -c c:\myfolder\mysuite.config.xml -r ...

To specify the file from FitNesse, we include it in the COMMAND_PATTERN definition:

!define COMMAND_PATTERN {%m -c c:\myfolder\mysuite.config.xml -r ...}

The execution environment is re-initialized at the beginning of each test, to preserve test independence. This means any changes made to configurable items during test execution will not be visible to other tests. The exception is the SuiteSetUp page which changes the configuration for all subsequent tests.

The file format is XML. Here is a sample showing the configurable items:

<suiteConfig>
    <ApplicationUnderTest>
        <AddAssembly>myTests.dll</AddAssembly>
        <AddNamespace>myTests</AddNamespace>
    </ApplicationUnderTest>
    <Settings>
        <ApartmentState>STA</ApartmentState>
        <Behavior>std</Behavior>
        <CodePage>1200</CodePage>
        <InputFolder>myInput</InputFolder>
        <OutputFolder>myOutput</OutputFolder>
        <Runner>fitSharp.Slim.Service.Runner</Runner>
        <XmlOutput>myResult.xml</XmlOutput>
    </Settings>
    <FileExclusions>
        <Add>^\.svn$</Add>
    </FileExclusions>
    <Slim.Operators>
        <Add>my.Custom.Operator</Add>
    </Slim.Operators>
    <Fit.Operators>
        <Add>my.Custom.Handler</Add>
        <Remove>fit.Operators.ExecuteError</Remove>
    </Fit.Operators>
</suiteConfig>

We can also include custom configuration set up by adding nodes in the format:

<Our.Class>
    <aMethod>aParameterValue</aMethod>
</Our.Class>

The standard configuration items are listed below.

Apartment State
The default COM apartment state is MTA. It can be set to STA when testing with software that requires this.

Application Under Test
Assemblies and namespaces can be loaded to be used when looking for fixture classes.

Behavior
This is a comma-separated list of keywords to specify behavior that differs between different Fit versions.

These are the behavior keywords:

• std - removes leading and trailing whitespace, condenses embedded whitespace, converts br tags to line-feeds and performs some clean-up on Word-generated HTML. This is the parsing behavior of the original batch Fit.
• fitlibrary1 - converts special characters in member names into words, e.g. 'a+' becomes 'aplus'. This is the naming behavior of the original Fit Library.

The default behavior is the FitNesse parsing and naming behavior:

• whitespace in cell text is left unchanged.
• special characters in member names are dropped.

We can also include a setting in the Runner.exe.config file.

<appSettings>
    <add key="fitVersion" value="std,fitlibrary1" />
</appSettings>

Code Page
The default code page for file I/O is 1252 (Windows encoding). It can be set to other values to process Unicode, UTF-8 and other encodings. See the MSDN documentation for code page values.

File Exclusions
Regular expression patterns can be added to exclude files from Folder Runner processing.

Input Folder
The input folder for Folder Runner.

Fit.Operators/Slim.Operators
Operators can be added or removed from the Operator List used by Fit and Slim.

Output Folder
The output folder for Folder Runner.

Runner
The class that executes the tests.

XML Output
The file name for recording test results in XML format.