How to tell a test under cmake/ctest where to find its input data ... without changing hard-coded file names

Question

Directory prj/test contains some test scripts t01.exe, t02.exe etc. Some of them need input data d01.dat etc, also provided in prj/test. The names of these data files are hard-coded in the tests, and I cannot easily change this. The control file CMakeLists.txt contains

enable_testing()
file(GLOB test_sources "t*")
foreach(test_src ${test_sources})
    string(REGEX REPLACE ".*/" "" test_name "${test_src}")
    string(REGEX REPLACE ".exe$" "" test_name "${test_name}")
    add_test(${test_name} "${test_src}")
endforeach(test_src)

I'm building the project in a subdirectory prj/build. ctest works fine ... until a test requires input data. Obviously, they are not found because they reside in prj/test whereas the test runs in prj/build/test.

Hence my questions:

• What's the standard way to let the tests find their input data?
• Is there a way that does not require copying the data (in case they are huge)?
• True that symlinks don't work under Windows, and therefore are no acceptable solution?

Answer 1

add_test command accepts WORKING_DIRECTORY option. You can set this option to a directory where a test is located. So, the test will find its data file:

add_test(NAME ${test_name} COMMAND "${test_src}"
         WORKING_DIRECTORY ${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}
)

Answer 2

The variables ${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR} and ${CMAKE_SOURCE_DIR} are helpful. The first one is the source directory to the current binary location. The latter is the root to the top level of the source tree.

Supposed you have an input file at prj/test/inputfile you could get the path to it with${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}/inputfile. You can pass the path as an argument to your test.