Has anyone ever done the Cucumber + DBUnit setup for ruby ? (I am particularly trying to use it with Calabash for mobile app testing.)
Ideally it sounds like I should be able to add an #Before hook in Cucumber, so that I could there load the test data that I want into the database, before I proceed with the tests. Otherwise it seems to me that I have no way to do data-driven testing.
Note: I do know about Scenario outlines, but I am not (only) looking to run my test with different parameters - rather, I need to bring my database in a known state before I run my tests.
Thanks in advance
Have you considered giving database_cleaner a shot? You can setup database_cleaner so that it cleans your database before each test or whole test suite. It also works nicely with Cucumber.
Related
I'm using PHP with Laravel 5.5 framework.
I recently started writing unitTests for my code and I got a few questions:
What is the best way to interact with my database?
Should I use InMemoryDB like SQLite or Mock everything with Mockery.
If I have an interaction with DB than that is still unitTesting or Integration Testing?
Thank you for the answers in advence
I work in a company where we strive for 80% code coverage, in general we test mostly End-2-End, with database and mocking external calls, we use SQLite so our testsuite can run quickly in a local environment. When the case make sense, we unit tests it, as an example an Tax service i did for different countries i unit tested, because it was very input output based.
Why we prefer End-2-End:
It's quicker if you don't have to make unit, integration and end to end testing
You test the endpoint will actually will be used
I prefer to run with a real database if you are running with Continous Integration
There is drawbacks with SQLite, mainly it does not work as other RDB where there is a lot of settings and limitations, on top of my head i had problems with foreign key enforcing etc.
So to answer your question:
It's smart to use SQLite at least locally
In Unit Testing you are only testing one class and mocking everything else, you are basically testing that the code can execute. Note this is a oversimplified version on a very complex subject.
Am starting to write unit tests along the lines of https://github.com/neo4jrb/neo4j/wiki/How-To-Test
One of the approaches there is really slow (10 seconds per test) and the other doesn't delete labels (and probably other things)
Can anyone suggest a more elaborate approach? I noticed that in the core neo4j material, the java documentation describes methods that create and tear down temporary databases, but I don't see a way to access those from the (very nice) ruby and rails neo4j gems. Perhaps via the low-level REST api? It's hard to figure out what api calls are available.
So you could probably surround your tests in transactions which is a typical approach for testing with ActiveRecord in Ruby. That might be more performant, but it should also help keep the database clean.
But you're right, the impermanent database is the tool that's provided in Neo4j for temporary databases for testing. I think that's only available if you're running JRuby, though. I did run across this, though:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/neo4j/7xeEPWEiqD0
Which links to a project which lets you start up a Neo4j server in "in memory" mode (using the impermanent database):
https://github.com/jexp/neo4j-in-memory-server
That's showing examples for Neo4j 2.0.0, so I don't know if it would work for later versions, but it might be worth a shot for your testing database.
EDIT: Another thing that I just thought of is to use the vcr gem:
https://github.com/vcr/vcr
It basically records all of the requests made to your server and then plays them back. This works great for API endpoints where result are idempotent, but if you use it for a database like Neo4j you should make sure that your tests are clearing the database before every test run so that it always starts fresh
I have an interactive CLI app based on Highline gem. I can run it interactively for Cucumber tests using Aruba. But I can't using stubs and mocks, because Aruba starts my app as a child process. If I try to use Aruba::InProcess feature, it loses interactivity.
I have no idea any more. In what way can I testing such app?
What exactly do you want to stub and mock?
Cucumber is primarily used for integration testing, i.e. testing from end-user's point of view. End-users use the app through its interface, that's why cucumber does not provide easy ways of stubbing and mocking the app's internals and you should not do it either, at least not with cucumber.
Consider using fixtures for cucumber or unit testing with rspec.
If you want to stub out responses from 3rd parties, then you can use webmock gem to intercept requests and return fixtures as a response or fakefs to do the same for the filesystem.
Ok, I take that: Cucumber is not about stubs and mocks. And interactive CLI apps is, probably, the best example for it.
So, while you need interactivity, Cucumber through Aruba starts your app in a child process. And the only way for affect it, I find, is environment variables usage. For example, by setting variable with values 'production'/'development'/'test' I can change configuration of my app to using test DB instead of production etc.
Does anybody know a good data driven development framework/library/gem for Ruby? I know a ton for Rails but I couldn't find anything for Ruby itself. I have a standalone Ruby app and I want to generate test data and write test cases for different data sets. I don't want to use fixtures. Any suggestions?
You mean something like machinist? The readme mentions it can work without Rails.
When you are doing integration tests with either just your data access layer or the majority of the application stack. What is the best way prevent multiple tests from clashing with each other if they are run on the same database?
Transactions.
What the ruby on rails unit test framework does is this:
Load all fixture data.
For each test:
BEGIN TRANSACTION
# Yield control to user code
ROLLBACK TRANSACTION
End for each
This means that
Any changes your test makes to the database won't affect other threads while it's in-progress
The next test's data isn't polluted by prior tests
This is about a zillion times faster than manually reloading data for each test.
I for one think this is pretty cool
For simple database applications I find using SQLite invaluable. It allows you to have a unique and standalone database for each test.
However it does only work if you're using simple generic SQL functionality or can easily hide the slight differences between SQLite and your production database system behind a class, but I've always found that to be fairly easy in the SQL applications I've developed.
Just to add to Free Wildebeest's answer I have also used HSQLDB to do a similar type testing where each test gets a clean instance of the DB.
I wanted to accept both Free Wildebeest's and Orion Edwards' answers but it would not let me. The reason I wanted to do this is that I'd come to the conclusion that these were the two main ways to do it, but which one to chose depends on the individual case (mostly the size of the database).
Also run the tests at different times, so that they do not impact the performance or validity of each other.
While not as clever as the Rails unit test framework in one of the other answers here, creating distinct data per test or group of tests is another way of doing it. The level of tediousness with this solution depends on the number of test cases you have and how dependant they are on one another. The tediousness will hold true if you have one database per test or group of dependant tests.
When running the test suite, you load the data at the start, run the test suite, unload/compare results making sure the actual result meets the expected result. If not, do the cycle again. Load, run suite, unload/compare.