Testing

OGC CITE

Compliance benchmarking is done via the OGC Compliance & Interoperability Testing & Evaluation Initiative. The pycsw wiki documents testing procedures and status.

Tester

The pycsw tests framework (in tests) is a collection of testsuites to perform automated regession testing of the codebase. Test are run against all pushes to the GitHub repository via Travis CI.

Running Locally

The tests framework can be run from tests using Paver (see pavement.py) tasks for convenience:

$ cd /path/to/pycsw
# run all tests (starts up http://localhost:8000)
$ paver test
# run tests only against specific testsuites
$ paver test -s apiso,fgdc
# run all tests, including harvesting (this is turned off by default given the volatility of remote services/data testing)
$ paver test -r

The tests perform HTTP GET and POST requests against http://localhost:8000. The expected output for each test can be found in expected. Results are categorized as passed, failed, or initialized. A summary of results is output at the end of the run.

Failed Tests

If a given test has failed, the output is saved in results. The resulting failure can be analyzed by running diff tests/expected/name_of_test.xml tests/results/name_of_test.xml to find variances. The Paver task returns a status code which indicates the number of tests which have failed (i.e. echo $?).

Test Suites

The tests framework is run against a series of ‘suites’ (in tests/suites), each of which specifies a given configuration to test various functionality of the codebase. Each suite is structured as follows:

  • tests/suites/suite/default.cfg: the configuration for the suite
  • tests/suites/suite/post: directory of XML documents for HTTP POST requests
  • tests/suites/suite/get/requests.txt: directory and text file of KVP for HTTP GET requests
  • tests/suites/suite/data: directory of sample XML data required for the test suite. Database and test data are setup/loaded automatically as part of testing

When the tests are invoked, the following operations are run:

  • pycsw configuration is set to tests/suites/suite/default.cfg
  • HTTP POST requests are run against tests/suites/suite/post/*.xml
  • HTTP GET requests are run against each request in tests/suites/suite/get/requests.txt

The CSV format of tests/suites/suite/get/requests.txt is testname,request, with one line for each test. The testname value is a unique test name (this value sets the name of the output file in the test results). The request value is the HTTP GET request. The PYCSW_SERVER token is replaced at runtime with the URL to the pycsw install.

Adding New Tests

To add tests to an existing suite:

  • for HTTP POST tests, add XML documents to tests/suites/suite/post
  • for HTTP GET tests, add tests (one per line) to tests/suites/suite/get/requests.txt
  • run paver test

To add a new test suite:

  • create a new directory under tests/suites (e.g. foo)
  • create a new configuration in tests/suites/foo/default.cfg
    • Ensure that all file paths are relative to path/to/pycsw
    • Ensure that repository.database points to an SQLite3 database called tests/suites/foo/data/records.db. The database must be called records.db and the directory tests/suites/foo/data must exist
  • populate HTTP POST requests in tests/suites/foo/post
  • populate HTTP GET requests in tests/suites/foo/get/requests.txt
  • if the testsuite requires test data, create tests/suites/foo/data are store XML file there
  • run paver test (or paver test -s foo to test only the new test suite)

The new test suite database will be created automatically and used as part of tests.

Web Testing

You can also use the pycsw tests via your web browser to perform sample requests against your pycsw install. The tests are is located in tests/. To generate the HTML page:

$ paver gen_tests_html

Then navigate to http://host/path/to/pycsw/tests/index.html.