How to run Boost Test and produce Minidumps? - c++

Question

Our project uses Boost.Test for our units tests. We would like to get minidumps when unexpected exceptions occur during our test cases as well, so we've started integrating Google Breakpad to write the minidumps.
It looks like Boost.Test is intercepting all thrown exceptions from user tests - I'm assuming because Boost test cases wrap each function with a try / catch and the unit test simply fails if an unexpected exception is thrown. This prevents the Breakpad exception handler from firing and writing minidumps.
Is it possible to have Boost.Test not just catch and fail on unexpected exceptions in unit tests? And to instead let the exceptions go unhandled (or rethrow) so Breakpad or another exception handler can be triggered to write a minidump?

Answer 1

Boost.Test is designed to catch all exceptions from a test case in order to continue executing other test cases. I don't think you can turn this behavior off, but you can always consult the source code.
To achieve what you're after, I'd wrap the body of the test cases myself and catch exceptions and have breakpad minidumps written out when unexpected exceptions are thrown. You can genericize this by writing the catch/dump handler as a function that accepts a functor that is your test case body and invoking your handler with the test case body in a lambda:
void handler(std::function<void()> test_case)
{
try {
test_case();
} catch (...) {
write_minidump();
}
}
BOOST_AUTO_TEST_CASE(doit)
{
handler([] {
// do testing here
});
}
It will be more involved if you're using fixtures, but the same idea would apply.

Answer 2

I tried a few different approaches but the following solution provides the best result. Defining a macro to wrap the BOOST_AUTO_TEST_CASE macro, and surrounding the calling code with SEH __try/__except and piping the exception data into Breakpad.
#define CUSTOM_AUTO_TEST_CASE( test_name ) \
void test_name##_custom_wrapper(); \
\
BOOST_AUTO_TEST_CASE( test_name ) \
{ \
__try \
{ \
test_name##_custom_wrapper(); \
} \
__except(pHandler->WriteMinidumpForException(GetExceptionInformation()), EXCEPTION_EXECUTE_HANDLER) {} \
} \
\
void test_name##_custom_wrapper() \
Where pHandler is a Breakpad ExceptionHandler pointer.
The downside is you have to replace every occurrence of BOOST_AUTO_TEST_CAST with the wrapper macro. But it does the trick.