The execution environment for a suite of tests can be controlled by a suite configuration file. This is a way to consolidate configuration information into one place and to remove it from business-facing story tests. We specify the file in the command line for the fitSharp Runner with a -c switch:

pathToFitsharp\runner -c myPath\mysuite.config.xml ...

To specify the file from FitNesse, we include it in the COMMAND_PATTERN definition:

!define COMMAND_PATTERN {%m -c myPath\mysuite.config.xml ...}

The execution environment is re-initialized at the beginning of each test, to preserve test independence. This means any changes made to configurable items during test execution will not be visible to other tests. The exception is the SuiteSetUp page which changes the configuration for all subsequent tests.

The file format is XML, containing configuration items and values grouped into sections:

<suiteConfig>
    <section-name>
        <item-name>item-value</item-name>
        ...
    </section-name>
    ...
</suiteConfig>

Here is a sample:

<suiteConfig>
    <ApplicationUnderTest>
        <AddAssembly>myTests.dll</AddAssembly>
        <AddNamespace>My.Tests</AddNamespace>
    </ApplicationUnderTest>
    <Settings>
        <Runner>fitnesse.fitserver.FitServer</Runner>
    </Settings>
</suiteConfig>

We can also include custom configuration set up by adding nodes in the format:

<Our.Class>
    <aMethod>aParameterValue</aMethod>
</Our.Class>

The sections and configuration items are listed below.

ApplicationUnderTest
Assemblies and namespaces can be specified to be used when looking for fixture and domain classes.

• AddAssembly: loads the assembly.
• AddOptionalAssembly: loads the assembly, but is ignored if the assembly is not found. This may be useful when the suite configuration file is used in different situations where different assemblies may be present.
• AddNamespace: adds the namespace to a list that is used to look for classes when class names appear without a namespace.

Culture
The culture to use for test execution.

• Name: the name of the culture. The name "Invariant" can be used for the invariant culture.

FileExclusions
Regular expression patterns can be specified to exclude files from Folder Runner processing.

• Add: a regular expression to be added to the exclusion list.

Fit.Operators
Operators can be added or removed from the list of Cell Operators used by Fit.

• Add: name of the operator to add.
• Remove: name of the operator to remove.

Settings
General configurable items:

• ApartmentState: the apartment state. The default state is MTA. It can be set to STA when testing with software that requires this.
• Behavior: a comma-separated list of keywords to specify behavior that differs between different Fit versions.

• CodePage: the code page for file I/O. The default code page is 1252 (Windows encoding) for .NET Framework and UTF-8 for .NET Core. See the Microsoft documentation for code page values.
• InputFolder: the input folder for Folder Runner.
• OutputFolder: the output folder for Folder Runner.
• Runner: The class that executes the tests: fitnesse.fitserver.FitServer for Fit tests or fitSharp.Slim.Service.Runner for Slim tests.
• XmlOutput: the file name for recording test results in XML format from Folder Runner.