Hi,

I'm trying to get a particular dependency setup to happen, and so far I'm out of luck. So I'll probably have to do a programmatic workarond, but I feel this is something that you may want to support in a future version of testng. (Or maybe the support is there and I don't see it).

Here is what I'm after:

I'm testing an application that serves different customers. Customers have largely the same feature set, but there are differences. So, I have feature A,B,C,D and E. They are all dependent on each other and must run in that order. But feature D is not implemented for all our customers. Feature E can work without it, but must work with it when it is present So I need to test A -> B -> C -> D -> E for one test suite, and A -> B -> C -> E for another.

I've got all the groups and dependencies defined everything works well in the first scenario. But I'm trying to figure out how to get testng to not do the feature D test but still do the feature E test on the second.

Here is what I've tried:

Defining a metagroup in testng.xml for each suite. Each meta group with the same name, but one list A,B,C,D and one listing A,B,C. I then tried to reference the meta group in a dependsOnGroups annotation, but it appears that tests don't see meta groups.

I of course tried putting both C,D as dependent groups for test E, but dependsOnGroups appears to be inclusive so both C and D have to occur. And if I get feature D to skip depending on the partner then E skips as well for that partner.

So having tests be able to see meta groups, or having a version of dependsOnGroups where only one of the groups listed have to run in order for the dependency to trigger seems to be the solution.