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2009年03月19日

Pluggable test classes

Ovid has written a series of interesting articles on Test::Class on the "Modern Perl Books" blog. Read them:

In my work project — we are developing the software for the .at domain name registry — we maintain several module distributions. There is a core registry distribution and an .at-specific registry distribution that inherits from the core. The reason for doing it this way is that our software seems to be quite successful and we are doing registries for other countries as well.

When running tests for the .at registry, we want to run tests that are defined in the core registry as well, to make sure that we haven't broken any core functionality by inheriting.

There is Test::Class::Load to load test classes automatically, but it only takes directory paths. What we want is to specify package namespaces. So I've thought about using Test::Class together with Module::Pluggable.

Our core test classes look something like this:

Registry::Test::Foo
Registry::Test::Bar
Registry::Test::Baz

The .at registry distribution also defines tests:

Registry::NICAT::Test::Frobnule
Registry::NICAT::Test::Hoge

Each of them defines tests using the Test attribute provided by Test::Class. If we want to run all of them, we use this somewhat simplified program:

use Module::Pluggable
    search_path => [ qw(Registry:Test Registry::NICAT::Test) ],
    require     => 1;
BEGIN { main->plugins }  # just load them
Test::Class->runtests;

The BEGIN block is necessary so that the plugins, that is to say, the test classes, are actually loaded. The require => 1 doesn't actually cause the classes to be loaded immediately; it only says that when we call plugins() the classes should be loaded.

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