FitNesse dynamic fixture for test table?

Question

Is it possible to have a dynamic fixture for a given FitNesse table? Here is a simple example table:

|SetUpRequestFixture                 |
|base element|xml-request            |
|key         |test123                |

Is it possible to write a method inside the Fixture class for setting up any number of child arguments? I would like to be able to extract the key/value pairs in any number of FitNesse tables to be able to build a XML string from them. Something like this:

public class SetUpRequestFixture {
  public void setUp(String... arguments) {

  }
}

I've been looking at http://fitnesse.org/FitNesse.UserGuide.FixtureGallery.FitLibraryFixtures.SetUpFixture but it looks like it needs the name of every element in the method header. Also, this would not work because it removes the name/value association created with the parameters.

Could I define my own fixture that overrides the default parsing behavior? It could be a valuable addition to the next version of Fitnesse.

Answer 1

Yes you can. A fixture can get access to the structure of the table and do anything it wants to. In classic Fit, you override the doRows method:

public class MyFixture extends Fixture {
    public void doRows(Parse rows) {
        ... use methods on rows to iterate through the table
    }
}

Take a look at the fitlibrary source code for some good examples of how this works. (There may be some newer method to do this in fitlibrary - I'm not up to date on what the author has been doing.)