History for FunctionalTesting
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Functional Testing Readme
The functional testing support of !ZopeTestCase was inspired by
Marius Gedminas' work for Zope 3.
Deriving from the 'Functional' mix-in (and an xTestCase) adds a
'publish' method to your test case class. Tests can call
'self.publish(path, basic=None, env=None, extra=None, request_method="GET" stdin=None)',
passing a path and, optionally, basic-auth info and form data.
The path may contain a query string.
'publish' returns an enhanced Response object, that can be queried
for status, response body, headers, etc.
'publish' invokes the !ZPublisher machinery just as if the request
had come in through !ZServer. This allows for high-level testing
of things like argument marshalling, form validation, and traversal.
Note that the tests have *full access to the ZODB*. This means you
can easily prepare a fixture for 'publish' and/or check the impact
of a publication on the database. This represents a major advantage
over purely URL-based test environments!
Please see the 'testFunctional.py' example test for more.
While the modules are called 'functional.py' in both Zope 3 and
!ZopeTestCase, it is current wisdom that such tests are not truly
"functional tests", but rather "integration tests".
True functional tests, in their most-helpful guise as "acceptance
tests", must be able to test the end-user experience. For web
applications this means: browser simulation.
Plone 2 comes with an 'ftests' package combining the functional
testing support of !ZopeTestCase with the "mechanize" browser
simulator library: http://wwwsearch.sourceforge.net/mechanize/
(For some version of 2, currently only available from the Plone
SVN trunk.)
Read the Source
Amen. Read 'functional.py' and 'sandbox.py' if you want to know
what's going on behind the scenes.