Organizing Table Tests in Go

Organizing Table Tests in Go: two approaches to organizing use-cases for a unit test.

Table tests are one of the approaches to how to organize multiple use-cases for a single test. In this tutorial, I want to share my approach on how I organize table tests and structs used for it.

Standard Approach

Most IDEs can generate table-driven tests automatically. For this only thing, you need is to navigate to the function and use a command to generate the tests. In VS Code, you can do this by using the “ Go: Generate Unit Tests For Function” command.

Command to generate unit tests in VS Code.

For the following function:

func (mui *MemUI) Register(objs ...interface{}) error {
	for _, obj := range objs {
		err := mui.registerValue(obj)
		if err != nil {
			return err
		}
	}


	return nil
}

View the source code at this state.

We will have something like this:

func TestMemUI_Register(t *testing.T) {
	type fields struct {
		memObjects map[string][]interface{}
	}
	type args struct {
		objs []interface{}
	}
	tests := []struct {
		name    string
		fields  fields
		args    args
		wantErr bool
	}{
		// TODO: Add test cases.
	}
	for _, tt := range tests {
		t.Run(tt.name, func(t *testing.T) {
			mui := &MemUI{…