# Advanced googletest Topics
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## Introduction
Now that you have read the [googletest Primer](primer.md) and learned how to
write tests using googletest, it's time to learn some new tricks. This document
will show you more assertions as well as how to construct complex failure
messages, propagate fatal failures, reuse and speed up your test fixtures, and
use various flags with your tests.
## More Assertions
This section covers some less frequently used, but still significant,
assertions.
### Explicit Success and Failure
These three assertions do not actually test a value or expression. Instead, they
generate a success or failure directly. Like the macros that actually perform a
test, you may stream a custom failure message into them.
```c++
SUCCEED();
```
Generates a success. This does **NOT** make the overall test succeed. A test is
considered successful only if none of its assertions fail during its execution.
NOTE: `SUCCEED()` is purely documentary and currently doesn't generate any
user-visible output. However, we may add `SUCCEED()` messages to googletest's
output in the future.
```c++
FAIL();
ADD_FAILURE();
ADD_FAILURE_AT("file_path", line_number);
```
`FAIL()` generates a fatal failure, while `ADD_FAILURE()` and `ADD_FAILURE_AT()`
generate a nonfatal failure. These are useful when control flow, rather than a
Boolean expression, determines the test's success or failure. For example, you
might want to write something like:
```c++
switch(expression) {
case 1:
... some checks ...
case 2:
... some other checks ...
default:
FAIL() << "We shouldn't get here.";
}
```
NOTE: you can only use `FAIL()` in functions that return `void`. See the
[Assertion Placement section](#assertion-placement) for more information.
### Exception Assertions
These are for verifying that a piece of code throws (or does not throw) an
exception of the given type:
Fatal assertion | Nonfatal assertion | Verifies
------------------------------------------ | ------------------------------------------ | --------
`ASSERT_THROW(statement, exception_type);` | `EXPECT_THROW(statement, exception_type);` | `statement` throws an exception of the given type
`ASSERT_ANY_THROW(statement);` | `EXPECT_ANY_THROW(statement);` | `statement` throws an exception of any type
