Upayavira --
So, a UnitTestingPipeline in combination with extensions to the CLI/Bean to be able to configure this pipeline, wouldn't be too hard to implement. Are you interested?
That is an angle I had not considered -- it does provide a flexible way to test not only the end result, but also the intermediate steps of a pipeline. My only concern would be that using a different pipeline may taint the testing process as you wouldn't use the UnitTestingPipeline in a live application.
When I was first thinking about this, I was imagining testing short internal-only pipelines -- the types of pipelines that would be aggregated in other pipelines. For example, just testing the result of a FileGenerator + SQLTransformer pipeline. In contrast, testing the result of complete pipelines seems best handled by existing tools such as HTTPUnit, Cactus, or the anteater scripts that Vadim pointed out to me.
I think the bit that Vadim didn't perhaps mention is that you could use something like HTTPUnit with cocoon views, thus getting at the content at a certain point in a pipeline. You could even build views that have transformations to simplify this XML, so that when you get XML out of your view, you can do an identity comparision with your expected XML.
That way you could do 'unit testing' of pipeline stages with a functional testing tool such as HTTPUnit or Anteater, just using cocoon views when generating the page.
Since I'm still a few days away from actually writing pipelines for my application, it is hard for me to say which style of testing would be most useful. I plan on isolating all my logic in flow (that calls other components) and using the pipelines strictly for gathering xml and transforming it for display.
Do you feel the CocoonBean could be modified to grab the output from the short, internal only type pipelines that I described?
The challenge would be how to link a particular XML that has been 'intercepted' within a pipeline with an expected XML. How do you 'annotate' a pipeline to identify what XMLs you're expecting? If you can just say:
<generator-xml src="..."/>
<transformer-xml src=".../"/>
<transformer-xml src=".../"/>
<transformer-xml src=".../"/>
<serializer-xml src=".../"/>
It might work, but how would you deal with aggregation, etc. I suspect that building the pipeline wouldn't be too hard, but working out how to build the configuration side of things would be quite a challenge.
I imagine I'd have to expose those internal pipelines to the outside somehow...
See above stuff on views.
perhaps your solution would be the easiest.
Not sure. I'd try anteater and view first.
Maybe when I reach the point where I need something I'll to cobble together a UnitTestingPipeline.
I'd be interested to see it if you do!
Regards, Upayavira
