[Zope-dev] zope.testbrowser and WebTest (round 2)

[Wolfgang Schnerring]

Hello Brian,

it's taken a while, but I finally had a chance to review your branch(es).

* Brian Sutherland <brian at vanguardistas.net> [2011-02-12 18:57]:
>> > On Tue, Feb 01, 2011 at 09:32:11AM +0100, Wolfgang Schnerring wrote:
>> >> I'd prefer if we treated this as two separate steps, then:
>> >> a) improve the testbrwoser+wsgi story by replacing wsgi_intercept with WebTest
>
> I pulled this out of my original branch and put it here:
>     svn+ssh://svn.zope.org/repos/main/zope.testbrowser/jinty-webtest3-minimal

Thanks, that helped me understand what's going on much better.

I do have a few questions about this part:

- Does the (webtest-based) wsgi.Browser behave similarly to the
  Publisher-Browser?

When we ported the wsgi_intercept variant from zope.app.wsgi, we found
that there were some idiosyncracies woven in that people may rely on.
This kind of stuff of course isn't documented, and we didn't do much
research, but rather took care to port what we found in zope.app.wsgi,
namely filtering some HTTP headers from the response (meh, doesn't feel
important), and handling Basic Auth headers (that feels important to
preserve).

- What should happen in zope.app.wsgi?

We moved the wsgi-based Testbrowser from there and left BBB imports to
zope.testbrowser.wsgi, taking care to be API compatible. I guess that
won't be possible with the WebTest-based Testbrowser (or would it?),
so we probably have to break that. (Hmm, would that imply a major version
bump there, too?)

Since the Grok people are the ones who probably use the zope.app.wsgi
Testbrowser the most, they should probably take the WebTest-Testbrowser
for a test drive and see whether it works for them, otherwise we're
going to make them quite unhappy if we just break zope.app.wsgi.
(Could you ask on grok-dev about that? I guess it's too buried here to
be noticed.)

- What's connection.py?

I don't really understand where that came from or what its purpose is,
especially since wsgi.py seems to be the only one that uses it?

Ah. I take that last bit back, the extracted Publisher-Browser in
zope.app.testing uses it, so I guess this is a split-off artifact of the
refactoring/extraction.

But I still don't really understand what it is all about. %-)

- The layer looks good. (OK, so that's not a question ;)

I'm glad you found a way that the browser can get the application "out
of the air". I've tried the explicit passing way on a project of mine,
and it's a huge hassle (I've ended up stuffing a preconfigured browser
instance into the doctest globs, ugh.)

I think it would be good if the layer stored the application of
self.app, we did that in the wsgi_intercept variant and were glad of it
a few times already.

>> >> b) extract the testbrowser part that talks to the Publisher
>
> This is here and by necessity includes the changes for step (a):
>     svn+ssh://svn.zope.org/repos/main/zope.testbrowser/jinty-webtest3
>     svn+ssh://svn.zope.org/repos/main/zope.app.testing/branches/jinty-testbrowser

The extraction of the Publisher-Browser makes a lot of sense, and looks
clean to me, as does the rewrite of the tests to use a plain WSGI app
instead of a Zope-based app.

> I would much prefer to merge both steps together.

Yes, I guess that makes sense because only step (b) includes proper
tests for everything.

Wolfgang