On Sat, Jun 27, 2009 at 2:22 PM, Kevin Kubasik<[email protected]> wrote:
> Should windmill tests default to non-isolated/non-transactional DB behavior?
> Basically, we are providing the means for functional tests, these should be
> tests like 'Register and Complete a Profile', then 'Edit Profile'. We don't
> want this as one massive test, and it seems like that would be the expected
> behavior most of the time, and still allowing for the option of specific
> tests being run in isolation seems like the best move. However, this could
> be confusing, or just bad practice, so I wanted to get some feedback.

You need to clarify your terms here - when you say "in isolation", do
you mean in the sense that the effects of test 1 shouldn't affect test
2 (i.e., the basic Unit Test premise), or are you referring to the
transactional testing framework that has been introduced for Django
v1.1? What are you trying to isolate from what?

> What is the general interest in test-only models as a public api? The
> mechanics of it have been worked out for the regression suite, but the
> debate falls to one of the following systems.
>
> A class used instead of db.Model (db.TestModel)
> A module in the app (test_models.py)
> Similar to fixtures (a property on tests)
> A settings option

It's not entirely obvious to me what these alternatives mean. You're
describing a relatively complex feature, yet your explanation of four
options doesn't dig much deeper than 4 words in a parenthetical
comment. That isn't much to base a design judgement upon.

Here are my expectations as a potential end user of this feature:

 * I should be able to define a test model in exactly the same way as
any other model (i.e., subclassing models.Model)

 * Test models shouldn't be defined in the same module as application
models. Putting the test models somewhere in the tests namespace
(e.g., myapp/tests/models.py) would make some sort of sense to me, but
I'm open to other suggestions.

 * There must be sufficient flexibility so that I can have different
sets of models for different tests. For example, the admin app should
be testing behavior when there are no models defined. It should also
test behavior when there are N models defined. These two test
conditions cannot co-exist if there is a single models file and all
models in that file are automatically loaded as part of the test app.

 * The test models should appear to be part of a separate test
application - i.e., if I have a test model called Foo in myapp, it
should be myapp_test.Foo (or something similar), not myapp.Foo.

 * The appropriate housekeeping should be performed to ensure that app
caches are flushed/purged at the end of each test so that when the
second test runs, it can't accidentally find out about a model that
should only be present for the first test.

I'm open to almost any design suggestion that enables this use case.

> I am assuming that code coverage of windmill tests isn't that useful of a
> number, given the specialized execution paths etc. But I wanted to double
> check that people wouldn't be surprised by that.

I wouldn't rule out the proposition that someone might be interested
in this number.

I'm also a little confused as to why this decision is even required.
My understanding was that determining code coverage is one problem;
starting a Windmill test was a separate problem. As I understood it,
both features were being layered over the top of the standard UnitTest
framework, so if you wanted to determine code coverage of a Windmill
test, it would just be a matter of turning on the coverage flag on
your django.test.WindmillTest instance. Have I missed something
important here?

Yours,
Russ Magee %-)

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