Members' ordering

If you’re not familiar with the way to specify a test on members of a hierarchy (or level), read first the page about [members].

Assertion

The assertion consists in a validation that members are displayed, on the client, in a specified order. To achieve this, you need to specify an assertion of type order, such as:

<test>
  ...
  <assert>
    <ordered/>
  </assert>
</test>

The assertion order supports different options:

• alphabetical
• chronological
• numerical
• specific

The three first options are pre-defined standard rules. Alphabetical is indicated for strings, chronological to date and time members and finally numerical to numeric values. The option specific lets you define your own rule (see below).

The chosen option must be specified with the help of an xml attribute rule.

<ordered rule="alphabetical"/>

Important note: if a member cannot be converted to a valid date or numeric, and you’re applying a rule chronological or numerical, the test will not fail. The test will simply ignore the members that cannot be converted. This is not a bug but it’s done by design. If NBi was failing a test when failing to convert a member, it’d mean that members such as “N/A” or “Unknown” in a numerical or date attribute will always break the test. It’s probably not what you want.

Specific order

For some hierarchies or levels, you’ll want to display the members in a specific order because you cannot simply use the predefined rules alphabetical, chronological or numerical. To define the expected order, you can make usage of xml elements rule-definition and item.

<ordered rule="specific">
  <rule-definition>
    <item>My First Item</item>
    <item>My Second Item</item>
    <item>My Third Item</item>
    <item>My Fourth Item</item>
    <item>My Last Item</item>
  </rule-definition>
</ordered>

Important note: If, during execution, the test is encountering a member not specified in the rule (expl: My Fifth Item) then the test will not fail. In like manner, if the test is not encountering a member defined in your rule, the test will not fail. If you want to perform assertions to ensure that no expected or unexpected members exist, you should use the assertions described at the page members’ collection.

Another option to define a sorted list of items, is to define a one-column-query. The result of this query will be used the same way of the static list of items.

<ordered rule="specific">
  <one-column-query>
    select myColumn from myTable order by mySortColumn;
  </one-column-query>
</ordered>

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