NestedTests v0.4.0 - run tests in nested environments.

See the v0.4.0 documentation for details.

Motivation

When creating a test suite, it is often the case that many tests share the same setup (and teardown) code. In particular, it is often the case that the tests form a tree, where some setup is common to many tests, and additional setup is common to a subset of the tests, and so on until reaching the leaf test cases of this tree.

This package is built around this concept. It runs all the leaf test cases, and for each one, it runs all the setup code needed for it, from scratch. That is, all the tests cases are isolated from each other and can freely modify the prepared test data.

The main function of this package is nested_test, which introduces a new sub-test to run. In addition, you can always get the full path name of the current test environment using test_name. For example, consider the following:

nested_test("top") do
    db = create_temporary_database()
    @assert test_name() == "top"
    @test is_valid_database(db)

    nested_test("simple operations") do
        @assert test_name() == "top/simple operations"
        fill_simple_operations_data(db)
        @test simple_operations_work(db)
    end

    nested_test("complex operations") do
        @assert test_name() == "top/complex operations"
        fill_complex_operations_data(db)
        @test complex_operations_work(db)
    end
end

The framework will run both the simple operations tests and the complex operations tests. Nested test cases have full access to the variables introduced in their parent, following Julia's nested variable scopes; this allows both leaf test cases to access the db variable from the top level test case. However, the framework will re-run things so that each of the leaf tests will get a fresh database, isolating the leaf tests from each other. If a parent test case fails for any reason (including failed @test assertions), then its child tests are skipped.

If you call abort_on_first_failure(true), then the first failed test will abort execution. You can also restrict the set of test cases that will be executed by specifying a list of prefixes, e.g. test_prefixes(["top"]) will restrict the executed tests to only cases nested under top.

NOTE: Don't try to wrap nested_test inside a @testset - it won't work since @testset takes over the failed @test assertions making it difficult for the nested_test to tell when a test case failed. It would have been nice to integrate both systems so that each nested test case would be a @testset, or at least the top-level nested test case would be, but this requires deep integration with the implementation of @testset. If someone wants to take a stab at this, pull requests are welcome :-) For now we print the total number of passed/failed test cases (not @test assertions) at the end, together with the elapsed time.

Installation

Just Pkg.add("NestedTests"), like installing any other Julia package.

License (MIT)

Copyright © 2023 Weizmann Institute of Science

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