Java test setup with NetBeans, Maven

Question

How could I set up NetBeans and Maven so that:

1. I can easily run my tests from NetBeans (see below)
2. Use the NetBeans debugger on tests that fail
3. I can avoid having to copy lots of boilerplate declarations across all (NetBeans) test projects, of which I have many?

For these tests, I have separate NetBeans projects that collect all the code necessary to run the tests. Because they are larger than usual "unit" tests, they don't use junit or such that NetBeans understands. To run the tests outside NetBeans, I basically run:

java -jar mytestframework.jar some other args TestClass1

where mytestframework.jar is the same JAR for all test projects (defined in some separate project), and TestClass1 is the main class defining the tests in that particular project.

If I declare TestClass1 to be the "main class" in NetBeans, it meets all the requirements except that NetBeans will obviously run the main method in TestClass1 , and not in mytestframework.jar . I cannot pick mytestframework.jar interactively in NetBeans, but I can open nbactions.xml and manually set the run and debug invocations to what they need to be. That's a lot of work, and hard to maintain, given that I have many such test projects.

Is there a better way? Some kind of custom NetBeans action invoking some kind of Maven plugin inherited from a shared parent pom, perhaps, or such?

Answer 1

Tools -> Options -> Java -> Maven -> Edit Global Custom Goal Definitions...

Here you can create actions available to all projects, eg. execute a jar using the exec:exec goal.