Re: [Pyunit-interest] passing arguments to TestCase constructor through makeSuite

[Steve P. <ste...@ya...>]

Andrew Wilcox wrote:
> In my application, I'm passing some contextual information into my TestCase
> constructor with a couple of extra arguments.  (I'm using Zope, and the
> request information is passed in to me as an argument).  This is easy
> enough to do, but the makeSuite function only calls the constructor with
> the method name.

Hi Andrew,

Thanks for sharing this.

Your example illustrates the complication of testing inside a server
environment, where the tests are dependent upon the environment. I'd love to
hear more about how you're tackling this.

I'm having a lot of the same issues currently, but with the Java and JUnit in
the Enhydra application server. My take on things is the following:

Usually every TestCase should be instantiable and runnable in its own right,
given the right environment, and so it is not recommended to pass in context
information. The test case should create its own context in the setUp method.

In server environments such as Zope, this often means artificially creating
requests from within the test case. A TestRunner subclass customised to the
server is often written, and its task of running of tests inside the
environment is triggered by a request from outside the server process, e.g. by
http. In the case of Zope, this might mean writing a TestRunnerProduct or
suchlike. I think there's some information on Zope.org about using PyUnit
with Zope, though I don't know how much detail there is.

Best wishes,

-Steve

-- 
Steve Purcell, Pythangelist
"Life must be simple if *I* can do it" -- me