Stephen Eley wrote:
On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 6:27 PM, Ben Mabey <b...@benmabey.com> wrote:
Well, in this case the ARMailer is an arguably better alternative than
waiting on an SMTP connection for ActionMailer in production settings.
ARMailer was not created to solve testing woes.. it was created it solve
production woes. :) The fact that it helps in testing is just a side
effect.
Oh, sure. I wasn't trying to be critical against ARMailer itself; I
do think that e-mail is the sort of side process that ought to be
brought out of the request critical path one way or another. But
that's unrelated here. It just seems like the sort of process change
that might be overkill for 'I upgraded my gems and then my testing
toolchain broke.' Testability may be a factor in initial tool
selection, but in this case the tool *was* testable until the tests
were broken by an unrelated change. Once a production process is in
place, I think changes to it should be driven by business
requirements.
Yeah, and so I probably wouldn't change to ARMailer in production if
that was an issue or wasn't really needed. So I agree with you there.
However, I wouldn't have a problem in using ARMailer in my tests but
still use straight ActionMailer in production. ActionMailer works and I
don't need to test that. What I'm interested in testing is if I am
sending the correct emails at the correct time. If I really need to
test this part of the app in conjunction with selenium or another
secondary process then setting up ARMailer just for that purpose seems
like a reasonable investment. Once you have that tested the only point
of failure in production would be your ActionMailer settings. I'll point
out that you will face the same risk when using ActionMailer in :test
mode anyways. So coming up with a method to test your settings would be
needed in either case. My method for doing this is clicking through the
site once to fire off an email and never changing the working production
settings again. :)
An alternative to using ARMailer would be to use something like
Mailtrap[1] that acts as a dummy SMTP server to capture the emails from
the app. You would then need to provide a way for the tests to access
these emails to verify them.
Both ways involve some extra work. If it isn't worth the investment
then the only other option is to test the emails apart from the selenium
tests. It just depends on how important it is that you test everything
at the same time.
-Ben
1. http://github.com/mmower/mailtrap/tree/master
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