NUnit APIs
NUnit provides three levels of APIs for discovering and running tests. Only one of them - the highest level - is intended for general usage. The others have very specific purposes and we recommend that they only be used for those purposes.
The three APIs, from highest to lowest level, are:
- Test Engine API - for use by any program that needs to discover and execute tests.
- Engine Driver API - for use by framework drivers, intended to be loaded by the engine to enable communication with a particular framework.
- Framework API - used by NUnit's own framework driver to communicate with the framework.
The NUnit TestEngine is a separate component, introduced in NUnit 3.0, which knows how to discover and execute tests. It provides an API for both simple batch execution and more complex interaction as needed by Gui test runners. It also provides additional Engine services beyond what the framework provides. This is what we recommend for use by anyone needing to run NUnit tests programatically.
See Test Engine API for more info.
The NUnit TestEngine uses drivers to communicate with test frameworks. It is possible to create a driver for running any sort of test framework, supporting any language at all. The driver API is what makes this possible. The TestEngine has support for the NUnit 3 framework built in. An extension driver for running NUnit 2 tests is also available.
The driver API is only intended to be implemented by drivers and is only used by the NUnit engine. See Engine Driver API for more info.
This is a primitive API implemented by the NUnit 3 Framework. The NUnitFrameworkDriver in the engine uses this API. The API is a bit complicated to use. Since it needs to support multiple versions of the framework, it uses well-known framework class names, which are constructed via reflection. All results are returned as raw XML.
This API is not intended for any use except by NUnit itself. See Framework API for more info.