The -genTest option causes test functions to be generated. These functions can be used to populate variables of generated types with random test data or data from an existing XML instance. They have two main purposes:
To allow testing of the application code with a wide-variety of test data, and
To provide a code template for users to use to write code to populate variables
The second item is quite useful to users because generated data types can become very complex as the schemas become more complex. It is sometimes difficult to figure out how to navigate all of the lists and pointers. Using -genTest can provide code that may be modified to accomplish the population of a data variable with any type of data.
The generated test functions are written to a .c file with a name of the following format:
<xsdFileName>Test.c
where <xsdFileName> is the base name of the XSD file being parsed. For example, if code is being generated for file x.xsd and -test is specified, test functions will be written to xTest.c . If the file being processed is a WSDL file, the suffix would be WSDLTest.c (for example, x.wsdl would produce xWSDLTest.c ).
The format of the name of each generated test function is as follows:
[<ns>]Test_<elemName>
where <elemName>is the name of the XSD
global element for which the function is being generated and
<ns>is an optional namespace setting that
can be used to disambiguate names from multiple sources (note: this
should not be confused with XML namespaces which are different). Note
that test routines are generated only for global elements within a
specification.
The calling sequence for each generated test function is as follows:
<typeName>* pvalue = <testFunc> (OSCTXT* pctxt)
In this definition, <testFunc> denotes the formatted function name defined above.
The pctxtargument is used to hold a context pointer to
keep track of dynamic memory allocation parameters. This is a basic
"handle" variable that is used to make the function reentrant so that
it can be used in an asynchronous or threaded application. The user is
required to supply a pointer to a variable of this type declared
somewhere in his or her program. The variable must be initialized using
either the rtxInitContext or
rtXmlInitContext run-time function
before use.
The pvalueargument is a pointer to hold the populated
data variable. This variable is of the type generated for the XSD type
of the global element. The test function will automatically allocate
dynamic memory using the run-time memory management for the main
variable as well as variable length fields within the structure. This
memory is tracked within the context structure and is released when the
context structure is freed.