Infrastructure

It would be advantageous to have common tests cases for integration testing, and possibly available to unit tests as well. The current proposal is to take advantage of the existing location in the repository: d1_integration/src/test/resources, and (re)locate python integration tests into d1_integration as well.

If a more generalized location is needed, the proposal would be to create a new folder under cicore/trunk/. For consideration here is balancing the pros and cons of relying on external data for unit tests, which would evolve independent from the package, but would also be branched and tagged.

Related is the recommendation of creating negative test cases that contain invalid or malformed data to test error handling capabilities of the dataONE products.

Instead of adding to the classpath to make resources available, suggest moving the common test resources into their own standalone package, or perhaps bundled with the schemas. A simple test indicates that the java method getResourceAsStream() will find resources contained within dependencies. Moving them to an independent package that becomes a dependency of d1_common_java will allow us to version (tag) the data files along with the schema versions. This allows us to control support to earlier schema versions through pom.xml configuration.