So in the "building block" story you talked about, that sounds like an
integration (functional? user acceptance?) test.. And I would treat
Solr the same way you treat your database that you are storing model
objects in.
If in your tests you bring up a fresh version of the db, populate it
with tables etc, put in sample data, then you should do the same with
Solr. My guess is that you have a "test" database running, and
therefore you need a live supported "test" Solr. And the same
processes you use so that two functional tests don't step on each
others data in the database can be applied to Solr!
You can think of tweaking solr config changes as similar to tweaking
indexes in your db.. Both require Configuration Management to track
those changes, ensure they are deployed, and don't regress anything.
Let us know how you get on!
Eric
On Mar 27, 2009, at 12:50 PM, Joe Pollard wrote:
Thanks for the tips, I like the suggestion of testing the document
and query generation without having solr involved. That seems like
a more bite-sized unit; I think I'll do that.
However, here's the test case that I'm considering where I'd like to
have a live solr instance:
During an exercise of optimizing our schema, I'm going to be making
wholesale changes that I'd like to ensure don't break some portion
of our app. It seems like a good method for this would be to write
a test with the following steps: (arguably not a unit test, but a
very valuable test indeed in our application)
* take some defined model object generated at test time, store it in
db
* run it through our document creation code
* submit it into solr
* generate a query using our custom criteria-based generation code
* ensure that the query returns the results as expected
* flesh out the new model objects from the db using only the id
fields returned from Solr
* In the end, it would be expected to have model objects retrieved
from the db that match model objects at the beginning of the test.
These building blocks could be stacked in numerous ways to test
almost all the different scenarios in which we use Solr.
Also, when/if we start making solr config changes, I can ensure that
they change nothing from my app's functional point of view (with the
exception of ridding us of dreaded OOMs).
Thanks,
-Joe
-----Original Message-----
From: Eric Pugh [mailto:ep...@opensourceconnections.com]
Sent: Friday, March 27, 2009 11:27 AM
To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org
Subject: Re: Best way to unit test solr integration
So my first thought is that "unit test + solr integration" is an
oxymoron. In the sense that unit test implies the smallest functional
unit, and solr integration implies multiple units working together.
It sounds like you have two different tasks. the code that generate
queies, you can test that without Solr. If you need to parse some
sort of solr document to generate a query based on it, then mock up
the query. A lot of folks will just use Solr to build a result set,
and then save that on the filesystem. "my_big_result1.xml" and read
it in and feed it to your code.
On the other hand, for you code testing indexing and retrieval, again,
if you can use the same approach to decouple what solr does from your
code. Unless you've patched Solr, you shouldn't need to unit test
Solr, Solr has very nice unit testing built in.
On the other hand, if you are doing integration testing, where you
want a more end to end view of your application, then you probably
already have a "test" solr setup in your environment somewhere that
you can rely on to use.
Spinning up and shutting down Solr for tests can be done, and I can
think of use cases for why you might want to do it, but it does incur
a penalty of being more work. And you still need to validate that
your "embedded/unit test" solr works the same as your integration/test
environment Solr.
Eric
On Mar 27, 2009, at 11:59 AM, Joe Pollard wrote:
Hello,
On our project, we have quite a bit of code used to generate Solr
queries, and I need to create some unit tests to ensure that these
continue to work. In addition, I need to generate some unit tests
that will test indexing and retrieval of certain documents, based on
our current schema and the application logic that generates the
indexable documents as well as generates the Solr queries.
My question is - what's the best way for me to unit test our Solr
integration?
I'd like to be able to spin up an embedded/in-memory solr, or that
failing just start one up as part of my test case setup, fill it
with interesting documents, and do some queries, comparing the
results to expected results.
Are there wiki pages or other documented examples of doing this? It
seems rather straight-forward, but who knows, it may be dead simple
with some unknown feature.
Thanks!
-Joe
-----------------------------------------------------
Eric Pugh | Principal | OpenSource Connections, LLC | 434.466.1467 |
http://www.opensourceconnections.com
Free/Busy: http://tinyurl.com/eric-cal
-----------------------------------------------------
Eric Pugh | Principal | OpenSource Connections, LLC | 434.466.1467 |
http://www.opensourceconnections.com
Free/Busy: http://tinyurl.com/eric-cal
