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Sample plugin doesn't contain tests (Feature #854)

Added by Enrique García Cota at 2012-02-01 09:48 am. Updated at 2012-03-21 10:21 pm.

Status:Open Start date:2012-02-01
Priority:Normal Due date:
Assignee:- % Done:

0%
Category:Documentation
Target version:-
Remote issue URL: Affected version:

Description

One of the problems I'm finding with Redmine/Chiliproject is that implementing a plugin using TDD seems like an obscure black art. The tutorials online I found (including the Redmine Plugin Tutorial and its empty Chiliproject Equivalent) don't mention tests at all; they pretty much encourage cowboy development.

I have tried to run tests on several plugins I found, but I soon hit problems:
  • There doesn't seem to be a standarized way of specifying dependencies in plugins. I had to hit errors "as I went". That was ok 3 years ago, but with rvm, bundler & company, even ruby 1.8.x, we have ways to cope with that. Am I missing something on that regard?
  • I don't think the "general and recommended strategy" for making tests in plugins is written in any place. Some of the plugins I found seemed to require to be "embedded into a host redmine app" in order to work. Is that the case for all plugins?

I'm sorry if I sound a bit frustrated. I spent 3 hours yesterday just trying to make Redmine Join Project to run its tests correctly, but I couldn't manage to make them run.

I think having an opinionated and exemplary test configuration in the Sample Plugin would help and encourage plugin devs to write better code. And would also help detecting incompatibilities/etc much easier.

Is there a recommended plugin with easy-to-run and complete tests out there that I can "spy" on? Maybe I can prepare a pull request for the sample project myself.

Associated revisions

Revision 7a05f8ed
Added by Jean-Philippe Lang at 2008-11-11 04:07 pm

Adds permissions to let users edit and/or delete their messages (#854, patch by Markus Knittig with slight changes).

git-svn-id: svn+ssh://rubyforge.org/var/svn/redmine/trunk@2019 e93f8b46-1217-0410-a6f0-8f06a7374b81

History

#1
Updated by Eric Davis at 2012-02-27 07:03 am

Enrique García Cota wrote:

I think having an opinionated and exemplary test configuration in the Sample Plugin would help and encourage plugin devs to write better code. And would also help detecting incompatibilities/etc much easier.

Agreed.

Is there a recommended plugin with easy-to-run and complete tests out there that I can "spy" on? Maybe I can prepare a pull request for the sample project myself.

Most of my plugins have tests. Try checking my GitHub for the most recently updated plugin. A few tips:

  • Any of my plugins that have a spec/ directory will not have working tests. Those were early plugins that used RSpec which proved to be more trouble than it was worth. More recent plugins have a test/ directory.
  • Any of my plugins prefixed with "chiliproject" are more current.
  • Any of my plugins with a Gemfile in the root of the plugin are compatible with ChiliProject 2.x.
  • Install the plugin and then in ChiliProjects root run bundle install. This will pick up the plugin Gemfile.
  • To run the tests, make sure you run them in the plugins root. You might need to install my helper gem redmine_plugin_support. Running rake test should be all you need to do.

I just looked for you and my message bar plugin is a simple, current, and tested plugin with no extra dependencies. If you can get the tests running and passing for it, you can move onto the more complex plugins.

  • Assignee deleted (Eric Davis)
  • Category set to Documentation

#2
Updated by Jan Vlnas at 2012-03-21 09:01 pm

I am looking into plugins TDD too but without any luck. Maybe there is something different in the development version of ChiliProject (running from master). Or it's because I am using Ruby 1.9.

Here's what I did:

  • Cloned Eric's Message Bar to vendor/plugins; works fine in the development installation
  • Installed redmine_plugin_support gem
  • Removed :metrics from plugin.tasks in plugin's Rakefile; that's because of metric_fu depends on rcov which is MRI 1.8-only.
  • Ran rake test from plugin's directory – fails with rather cryptic error `require': can't convert Array into String (TypeError) – see the full trace
  • rake test from the vendor/plugins directory runs the whole test suite; rake test:engines:all (as recommended on the afformentioned Redmine's Plugin Tutorial) seems to run the plugin's test suite which fails with the same error.

Am I doing something wrong? Maybe this is a problem of this one specific plugin, on the other hand, this plugin would be a great example if the test was working.

#3
Updated by Jan Vlnas at 2012-03-21 10:21 pm

Alright, it seems that source of the problem was this line in plugin's test_helper

Engines::Testing.set_fixture_path

Since this plugin doesn't use fixtures, I've fixed the test suite by commenting out the offending line. However there's a bug in Engines::Testing which adds an array to a $LOAD_PATH causing require to fail. I'll open a separate issue for this.

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