Thursday, September 24, 2009

Better server-side JavaScript unit testing

As part of a project aiming at a server and client-side tag library based Rhino, I thought it might be nice to write my unit tests in JavaScript. A quick Google search later and I find the non-uniquely named JsUnit project, which not only implements *unit in JavaScript, but has Ant and Maven 2 support. However, quite soon, I hit some problems, mainly around very little error reporting and feedback. Few things are as annoying as knowing there is a problem, but having no idea where.

A quick fork later and I now have JsUnit 1.3-db. So far, this fork adds:
* Callstack reporting for errors and failures
* Text test result output, not just XML
* File and line numbers in all error messages
* Upgraded Rhino

Previously, if you hit an error, you'd get this:
[INFO] [jsunit2:jsunit-test {execution: test}]
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[ERROR] BUILD FAILURE
Then, you'd have to dig into the target/surefire-reports/TEST-MyTestCase.xml to find this:
<testcase name="TestFieldTest.testRender" time="0.006">
<error message="ReferenceError: "bar" is not defined." type=""/>
</testcase>
Not helpful. Now, you get this:
[INFO] [jsunit2:jsunit-test {execution: test}]
TestRunner (1 test cases available)
> Starting test suite "TextFieldTest"
- Running test 1: "TextFieldTest.testRender"
ERROR in TextFieldTest.testRender: ReferenceError: "bar" is not defined. (TextField.js:7)

Stack trace:
1: TextField.js:7
2: TextFieldTest.js:6 (TextFieldTest_testRender)
3: JsUnit.js:827 (TestCase_runTest)
4: JsUnit.js:808 (TestCase_runBare)
5: JsUnit.js:386
6: JsUnit.js:409 (TestResult_runProtected)
7: JsUnit.js:390 (TestResult_run)
8: JsUnit.js:797 (TestCase_run)
9: JsUnit.js:1033 (TestSuite_runTest)
10: JsUnit.js:1014 (TestSuite_run)
11: JsUnit.js:2614 (EmbeddedTextTestRunner_run)
12: Components:4
< Completed test suite "TextFieldTest"
1 error, 0 failures.
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[ERROR] BUILD FAILURE
For fellow Maven folks, you can find the releases at my repo:

http://twdata-m2-repository.googlecode.com/svn/de/berlios/jsunit/jsunit-maven2-plugin

5 comments:

  1. Did you see the test runner that Shaoting cooked up for JavaScript tests?

    http://blogs.atlassian.com/developer/2009/09/run_your_jsunit_tests_as_normal_junit4_tests.html

    With this you can run them directly in your IDE using its built in JUnit support.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Nice, we should fold that back into jsunit. It would be nice to get the surefire integration it provides without all the setup that is needed currently with his solution. Since his uses jsunit, I'm guessing it shares the same issues as I found wrt poor error reporting and the lack of call stack reports.

    ReplyDelete
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