[Zope-dev] Re: Unit testing, ZUnit

[Butch Landingin]

--- In zope@egroups.com, Lalo Martins <lalo@h...> wrote:
<snip>
> We first conceived it as a kind of Zope-based version of
> unittestgui.py - you create a "TestRunner" object giving it the
> package, module and name of a TestSuite object generator (see
> the PyUnit documentation) and inside it you may click on some
> widget to run the tests and produce a "TestResult" object which
> you can inspect later. Does this sound like a good design?
> 
> Then I figured in the long run a Product isn't the best
> sollution; instead, fiddling with App/Product* sounds more like
> it, to allow developers to register tests just like they
> register classes, ZClass superclasses, _misc and help. Of
> course, just like the current registerHelp and others, it
> wouldn't be mandatory and not using it wouldn't break anything.
> 
> Then, in the Product's page in the Control Panel, there would
> be a tab "Test", where you'd be allowed to run the unit tests.
> 
> What do people think of this? What does DC think of this? Can I
> go ahead and develop it in this direction?

Kewl. ;^) please do!

I've been test-infected ever since I started using JUnit about 8 months
ago so I know the value of building a unittest framework for Zope.
I even started playing around with PyUnit and integrating it with Zope...

I got to the point where I had a ZPublisher-based framework that allowed me to 
have something like a function that had a relative url as its argument 
and it would return the rendered HTML... I then stored the string
into a file and it would allow me easily build tests that compared the
string output to the one stored in the file...

I was planning to do more (e.g. get to the point where I have a function with
a relative url as its argument which would return me the actual object -- this
would then allow me to run its methods and check its properties, check assertions, 
etc., etc... but then, my "real" work interfered and I had to put my plans in the 
backburner for  a while...(I might get back to this in a month or so, so I'm very 
interested in your project...keep us posted) 

I had envisioned it as something that ran on the commandline (not as a TTW thing) and
the context in which I was using it for was that I would be developing a lot of python
code and that running my test suite on the commandline would return the familiar "...." 
output that the commandline versions of Junit and PyUnit provide... it would also allow me
to run the GUI version without changing any of my unittests... My intention was that
most of the testing would be the testing of the application, so I didnt intend to test
the ZServer part of Zope (I assumed that ZServer would be passing the right URL to the ZPublisher)
 -- instead, everything would be run locally and single-threaded...(of course, this framework
is limited and can't do the testing of ZServer-related stuff -- e.g. virtual hosting stuff 
like ZServer -- but since I was more focused on the 'application', this wasn't such a big
deal compared to the benefit of being able to run my tests locally and with the flexibility
of running them either thru the commandline or thru a GUI...

So I do have some questions about how you intend the ZUnit to be used... e.g. -- lets say I'm
developing a Zope Application... I begin by writing the Python code interface, 
then I start writing the PyUnit test... in the the Setup section, I put in the code that hooks
me into the Zope ZODB, installs the product, sets the properties, etc.; in the test section, I
can get to the object, test my assertions, etc... and in the TearDown -- I back out my changes,
etc... Then I add this test to my Test suite...etc., etc...Then to run this test, I...do...what?

Also one coding caveat: when I started building my ZPublisher-based framework, I encountered
a bug I couldn't easily solve: I could run my PyUnit tests fine using the commandline
but when I tried to run them via the PyUnit GUI they failed : as far as I could tell,
the GUI version of PyUnit did something esoteric with the "import" function (which
would allow automatic reloading whenever you started it -- allowing you to leave the GUI
up all the time and you could modify your python code and it would reload correctly 
(this is equivalent to JUnit's LoadingTestRunner) -- unfortunately, it reacted badly
with Zope's 'esoteric' use of the "import" function as well ;^)...

HTH.

Butch Landingin
butchland@yahoo.com
http://squishdot.org

PS. Sorry for the rambling, its been a while since I last posted to the list and
I wanted to get a lot of things off my chest ;^)


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