First Pass at Testing My Own Fab.js App

‹prev | My Chain | next›

Stubbornly, I continue tonight trying to get started with testing my fab.js application. I found out last night that there is no easy way to run the fab.js test suite (and a @fabjs tweet this morning confirmed it). Still, I need to be able to test if I am going to seriously use fab.js.

Last night was not a complete waste. I did learn a thing or two about fab.js test strategies. I think that I will start with them tonight. I create my own test.js test suite and pull in the commonjs assert and puts (print):

#!/usr/bin/env node

var assert = require("assert")
  , puts = require( "sys" ).puts;

I then manually copy in the contents of fab.js's utils/test.js and pull in a function from my (fab) game to test:

#!/usr/bin/env node

var assert = require("assert")
  , puts = require( "sys" ).puts;

// utils/test.js from fab.js

var target_module = require('./lib/player_from_querystring');
test(target_module);

In lib/player_from_querystring.js, I paste the contents of the function that I wrote by hand last week to add a new player to the fab.js game and export it (using the commonjs exports):

function player_from_querystring() {
  var out = this;
  return function(head) {
    if (head.url.search) {
      var search = head.url.search.substring(1);
      var q = require('querystring').parse(search);
      var app = out({ body: {id: q.player, x: q.x || 0, y: q.y || 0} });
      if ( app ) app();
    }
    else {
      out();
    }
  };
}

exports.app = player_from_querystring;

To use that in the test framework, this library also needs to export a list of tests. For now, I just want to test that this is a unary app (which it is by virtue of receiving no arguments:

exports.tests = ( function() {
  var app = player_from_querystring( );

  return [

    function
    statusReturnsUnaryApp() {
      this( app.length === 1 );
    }
  ];
});

When I run the test framework, however, I get:

cstrom@whitefall:~/repos/my_fab_game$ node ./test.js 
Running 0 tests...
TypeError: Object function () {
  var app = player_from_querystring( );

  return [

    function
    statusReturnsUnaryApp() {
      this( app.length === 1 );
    }
  ];
} has no method 'forEach'
    at test (/home/cstrom/repos/my_fab_game/test.js:13:15)
    at Object.<anonymous> (/home/cstrom/repos/my_fab_game/test.js:33:1)
    at Module._compile (node.js:639:23)
    at node.js:667:20
    at fs:52:23
    at node.js:748:9

Hrm... I thought the tests being exported returned a list of things to test. What gives?

Ah, I am assigning exports.tests to a function, not the return value of that function. For the lack of an empty parens, my test fail. Adding the parens evaluates that function, returning the list of tests:

exports.tests = ( function() {
  var app = player_from_querystring( );

  return [
    function
    statusReturnsUnaryApp() {
      this( app.length === 1 );
    }
  ];
})();

With that, I get my first fab.js test to pass:

cstrom@whitefall:~/repos/my_fab_game$ node ./test.js 
Running 1 tests...
statusReturnsUnaryApp: true
Done. 1 passed, 0 failed.

It is not much. But it is a start. Up tomorrow, a retrospective (and B'more on Rails opensource hack night!). After that, perhaps more work with this or moving onto testing some of this with Cucumber.

Day #113