On Wed, 3 Nov 2004 15:11:08 -0600 "Laura McCord" <Laura.McCord@doucet-austin.com> wrote:
Is there a plugin or tool for zope/plone to traverse through a website checking for broken links?
The question is not as sharp as you would like. There is a philosphical problem here. In a dynamic world, what is a "broken link"? In a static, file-storage backed world, this was easy. A borken link was something that pointed to a file that did not exist. The webserver gave back an error message with 404 Status. A link checker is conceptually easy, at least as long as there is no authentication, and no forms are involved: find each href on a page, issue a http request for the object, see if the Status is < 400, if so, link is OK. Recurse. In a dynamic world, it is a bit less clear. There are several big problems. First, the pages that you are looking at will probably never recur exactly again. That is, they are probably dependent on who is looking at them, when they are being looked at, and some data in some persistent store. This makes life much more complicated. First, your tester has to understand authentication. Second, many zope pages are going to involve forms. Third, coverage is much more complex, you can't just blindly recurse and be reasonably sure that you are going to cover all the interesting cases. So, you are outside the world of linkchecker, and into the world of "functional testing". I have not used this, but I suspect that you are going to want something like: http://zope.org/Members/tseaver/FunctionalTests/view See also http://viii.dclxvi.org/bookmarks/tech/zope/test In particular, WebUnit might be of some interest. Jim Penny
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