Re: [tclwebtest] Passing variable parameters to test scripts

[Tilmann S. <ti...@ti...>]

Is your cambios-tclwebtest-2003-01-27b patch the latest one regarding
the issue of avoiding the usage of temporary files?

The approach I took with the temporary files looks like a huge hack to
me and it would be greatly appreciated if you'd remove that. I
remember that it seemed necessary in order to be able to retrieve the
_comment_ lines immediately before the command that failed, which
looks like an unnecessary requirement to me now. We should consider
introducing a better way to include msg-if-next-command-fails in the
tests.

One way would be to include a parameter for each of the commands that
can cause a test failure. I think that is the standard testing
framework approach.

Another idea would be to add a command like msg that takes one string
as argument, which will be saved internally and only output if a
following command produces a failure. To reset the fail_msg one would
simply call it with no arguments or an empty string. A test could thus
look like this:

msg { Logging in }

do_request $some_url
link follow "login"
field fill $password
form submit

msg


Or it could optionally wrap the code in a block so that the message is
only valid for that block:

msg { Logging in } {
    do_request $some_url
    link follow "login"
    field fill $password
    form submit
}


What is your opinion on the best syntax? We might also introduce a
common test declaration command along with it which could come at the
top of each file and which would make use of the api doc generator,
like this:

twt_test login {

    This test logs in to the website using the standard password.

    @author til

}

do_request ...


There are propably better names for these and maybe more that could be
learnt from other testing frameworks, but why I actually wrote it is
to say that the current requirement to be able to read the tcl
comments from the test source code is not really important, so don't
jump through big loops to preserve it when modifying tclwebtest to use
strings instead of temporary files, and please commit your patch with
these modifications, if not already done.



cheers, Til