Hands up if you’ve ever found a bug in your application..
Upgrades, feature enhancements and bug fixes are all part of the development lifecycle, but quite often with deadlines, it’s difficult to manually test the entire functionality of your application with every change you make. What if there were an automated way of checking if that change you’re making is going to break something?
Enter the CFWheels test framework!
In the past, writing an automated test suite against your application meant downloading, configuring and learning a completely separate framework. To help address this issue, CFWheels includes a small, simple, yet powerful testing framework. Whilst this has been part of the core in 1.x, it’s never been properly documented, and with 2.x, we’ve introduced lots of new features to help test your application.
Here is a simple example of unit testing a helper function that adds two numbers.
The same idea can be applied to just about any function in your application. Here are some of the things you might want to test:
- Global helper functions return the values expected
- That custom model validations return error messages when a value is not valid
- Model callbacks are fired and produce the expected result
- Controllers produce the expected output
- Controllers redirect to the correct location
Once you have a comprehensive test suite, you can make code changes with a greater sense of confidence that you have not introduced bugs (regressions) into your application. This gives you the opportunity to implement automated test runners into a continuous integration platform like Jenkins or TravisCI.
Don’t just take our word for it.. well actually, DO take our word for it as CFWheels 2.0 has been developed exclusively against the inbuilt test framework.
For those of you who have been using the testing framework in your CFWheels 1.x applications, the 2.0 framework has a number of improvements around setup, teardown and a super handy processRequest function:
You get lots of handy information back, like the body contents, the status code of the request, and more.
Want to get going? Check the comprehensive tutorial at guides.cfwheels.org