PrudentJunit is a junit plugin that allows you to conditionally ignore Junit tests based on a specified System Property. It's built to work with junit-4.9b3.jar. If you have an older version of Junit, it might not work for you.

Why is PrudentJunit necessary? While it is possible to *always* exclude a test using Junit's @Ignore annotation, there is no standard annotation in Junit to *conditionally* ignore a test based on a System Property.

PrudentJunit allows you to do this.

Here are a few simple rules on how to use PrudentJunit:

1. Put the PrudentJunit-<TimeStamp>.jar in your classpath.

2. In your test class, specify PrudentTestRunner as the TestRunner by placing this incantation before the class directive:
  @RunWith(value=PrudentTestRunner.class)

3. Annotate the tests that you want to run conditionally with the @PrudentTest annotation. All tests so annotated will run IFF a System Property named "junit.prudent" exists at run time and its value is "true" (case-insensitive).

4. If you'd rather have a differently named System Property, you may specify it by using the ifTrue element of the @PrudentTest annotation, like this:

  @PrudentTest(ifTrue = "my.very.own.system.property")

5. You may also use the plain-old @Test and @Ignore annotations in your test class as usual.

Please note that while the usual way to pass System Properties to a JVM that's launched from the command line is to use the -D switch, this does not work when you're running tests via an Ant target. (Ant does not pass *its* -D parameters to the underlying junit target.) To accomplish this requires a bit of Ant juggling. Please see the build.xml in the project on how to do this.

That's about all there is to it. Enjoy!

-Saleem Siddiqui