Emergent Web Technologies Spring 2009 Class 12

Activity 1

This activity uses the testing framework that comes with a standard Ruby on Rails installation. The Ruby on Rails community (and the Ruby community in general) are very enthusiastic about testing.

1 First, open up the Instant Rails console and create an application for testing by running the following commands

 rails testing_app
 cd testing_app
 ruby script/generate scaffold Location name:string address:string city:string state:string zip:string
 rake db:migrate

Before testing, you'll also need to set up the testing database by running the following commands

 rake db:migrate
 rake db:test:load 

2 The scaffold command automatically generated some tests for your application. We'll be looking at the unit tests for the location model.

First, make sure that the generated tests are working. This will verify that your scaffolded project has been set up correctly.

 cd test
 ruby unit/location_test.rb

If everything worked correctly, you should see a message that looks like this

 Started
 .
 Finished in 0.25 seconds.
 
 1 tests, 1 assertions, 0 failures, 0 errors

3 Now, open the generated test so that you can edit to actually your location model. You can find the test at the following location

 test/unit/location_test.rb

Modify the location test so it looks like this

 require 'test_helper'
 
 class LocationTest < ActiveSupport::TestCase  
   test "address works" do
   	  address = "11 E Adams"
 	
 	  location = Location.new
 	  location.address = address
 	
 	  assert_equal location.address, address
   end
 end

This simple test will test to make sure that the location address property actually works. Normally, you wouldn't need to test something simple like this, but we'll just work with the simplest examples for now.

4 Assume that a simple test looks something like this

   test "What the test is testing" do  	
 	  a_variable = "A value"

         location = Location.new
 	  location.property = a_variable
 	
 	  assert_equal location.property, a_variable
   end

Use this pattern to write a test for each of the location's properties: name, city, state and zip. Then run the test file to make sure that all of your tests pass.

Activity 2

This activity uses the Screw.Unit JavaScript testing framework. This is a simple and easy to use framework and, despite the name, it actually works pretty well.

Activity 3

This activity uses the Watir framework to remotely control your browser.