Hi Jacob,
Since you're mentioning global properties and data generation in the same sentence, I assume you want to be able to (dynamically) generate data in a single place which can be consumed throughout your test project (and all test suites in it and test cases inside of them).
Probably the best way to achieve what you're after is using a static method implemented in Groovy script. Let's say you would declare class, let's give it a nice name like
DataGenerator, and one of the corresponding
static methods, say
generateIntArray(arrayLength). You would then need to pack the Groovy file inside either a
Groovy script library or JAR file.
After you have done all this, you will be able to access this dynamically loaded property from your test cases using
dynamic property expansion:
${=com.example.utils.DataGenerator.generateIntArray(100)}
If you wish to reuse your dynamically generated data you would need to persist it in some way. Groovy offers many ways to implement persistence, not necessarily relying on Groovy internal classes only, i.e. you can use Java persistence implementations too.
I hope that this helps.
Cheers!
/Nenad Nikolic a.k.a. Shonzilla
