From: Nathaniel Talbott <ntalbott@...>
Date: 2001-10-16T07:12:25+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:22589] Re: [ANN] Lapidary 0.2.1

Matt Armstrong [mailto:matt@lickey.com] wrote:
>
> Using Lapidary, is there an easy way for teardown() methods 
> to know if the test failed?

It's easy to add for yourself (beware; untested code ahead)...

	class MattsTestCase < Lapidary::TestCase
		def initialize(*args)
			@failed = false
			super
		end
		
		def addFailedAssertion
			@failed = true
		end
	end

Now you can just sublcass MattsTestCase and check @failed in your
tearDown method.

I'll consider adding such functionality to Lapidary, if you truly find
it useful. See comments below...

> Why?  My tests are verifying the contents of various 
> dynamically built files on disk.  They are all put into a 
> temporary directory and when the test is done the directory 
> is removed.  But having that directory hang around for 
> post-mortem analysis is handy when the test fails.

[snip code]

> But it seems like a hack.  And I notice Lapidary uses 
> throw/catch to process failed assertions *before* calling 
> teardown, which I think prevents even this hack from working.  :-)

If it feels like a hack, I find that it often is a hack ;-)

There is a possibility that you could restructure your tests so that
they don't have to worry about removing things from the disk. One way of
doing this would be to use a MockObject to represent the file system, a
practice you can find out more about here:
http://www.mockobjects.com/endotesting.html. There is a Ruby/Mock
package, which I am currently working with Nat Pryce to integrate with
(and distribute with) Lapidary. So I guess this is just a suggestion to
reconsider the practice of writing out files to disk during unit
testing. There are times to do it, but I think they are less common than
is often practiced (myself included; I just discovered mock objects
recently).

Sorry the reply took so long; I've been at the RubyConf (which I greatly
enjoyed). Have fun, and let me know if you have any more questions.


Nathaniel

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