per run time environment idp.properties

[Rod Widdowson]

I may be thinking this one completely upside down, if so I'd welcome
suggestions.

After casting around for a while I'm getting a fair bit of traction testing
complex & arbitrary webflows by extending Tom's AbstractFlowTest class in
java-idp-testbed.

One of the constant frictions is my desire to use as much of the standard
configuration as possible sliding against the need to change the specific
portions of the config slightly so as to force whatever is being tested.  

You can do achieve of this by having bean definitions which overwrite the
standard ones (that’s how I'm injecting all the extra test web flows), but I
am beginning to see a need to be able to overwrite idp.properties in my test
environment.

In my example I'm wanting to test a few more C14N flows and so I want to
overwrite the setting of:

idp.c14n.flows = Simple

to be (for instance)

idp.c14n.flows = SAML2.*|Simple|Legacy.*

This is not amenable to a local bean overflow because that property is used
in a subsidiary file (subject-c14n-beans.xml) which I cannot overwrite
without overwriting the whole of that flow - and it's that flow I want to
test.  What I'm doing for the purposes of kicking the wheels is to make the
change locally and run the test and in this specific case I can probably get
away with checking in the change (or something like it) because that will be
close to what we want.

But we are not always going to be that lucky, so I am wondering whether
anybody has had any thoughts on how we might configure per test (or per
environment) versions of idp.properties.

However, as I said at the top I may be thinking about this in some sort of
upside down manner and so perhaps my requirements are not what I thought.
Or rather the requirements are the same but there is a better way of
achieving them.

Rod