@BeforeClass and inheritance - order of execution

Question

I have an abstract base class, which I use as a base for my unit tests (TestNG 5.10). In this class, I initialize the whole environment for my tests, setting up database map

Answer 1

How about having your @BeforeClass method call an empty specificBeforeClass() method that may or may not be overwritten by sub classes like so:

public class AbstractTestClass {
  @BeforeClass
  public void generalBeforeClass() {
    // do stuff
    specificBeforeClass();
  }

  protected void specificBeforeClass() {}
}

public class SpecificTest {
  @Override
  protected void specificBeforeClass() {
    // Do specific stuff
  }

  // Tests
}