Unit Testing DAOs with CFCUnit setUp() and tearDown()

Posted At : November 20, 2007 3:46 PM | Posted By : Paul Marcotte
Related Categories: CFCUnit,Unit Testing,ColdFusion

I recently starting Unit Testing with CFCUnit. Unit testing is not a new topic in the CF community, but it is new to me. I've found that there are a lot of aspects related to unit testing (like Mock objects and stubs) that you need learn about. As I continue to read and research unit testing techniques, I've seen items that go back years. One topic that I could not find a lot of information on is how to test DAOs and the SQL code in <cfquery/> tags. After rephrasing my serach terms a few times, I found a great post by Robert Blackburn that also lead me to a suggestion by Paul Kenney on the old CFCDev list to wrap the test within <cftransaction/>. I liked the idea of using <cftransaction/>, but decided to try something a little different.

[More]

Comments (6) | Print | Send | del.icio.us | Digg It! | Linking Blogs | 1141 Views
Comments
[Add Comment]
Brian's Gravatar Paul - this is a neat idea. One of the things I've struggled with is the permanent modification of the database when testing with CFCUnit and what to do about it when a test fails and leaves the DB in the "tested" state. I hadn't considered a transaction but this makes rolling back changes automatic.

I assume an example test case would run a method that changes the database, read back the record to confirm the change, then rollback the transaction?

Now that this post is 45 days old - how is this approach working for you?
# Posted By Brian | 1/6/08 10:10 AM
Paul Marcotte's Gravatar Hi Brian,

Thanks for the feedback. You're correct regarding a test case. If I'm testing a insert() or create() method, I perform a few operations in a single test case. First selectAll() and store the number of records, perform a insert, then test that another select is greater than the last by 1.

At the time that I needed this solution, I was building a test suite and was completely satisfied with the approach. Unfortunately, since that time, I haven't had much opportunity to work with it. :(
# Posted By Paul Marcotte | 1/6/08 9:53 PM
Ilya Fedotov's Gravatar Just wanted to say that I found this post useful and I am using your suggestion.
Even though I have a dev DB, it feels much better to clean up after inserts.
Thanks and hope to see you at CF.Objective()
# Posted By Ilya Fedotov | 4/11/08 10:44 AM
Paul Marcotte's Gravatar Hi Ilya,

Thanks for the comment. I use this setup with a dev database as well.

I really looking forward to meeting people at cf.O(). My first CF conference.
# Posted By Paul Marcotte | 4/11/08 3:30 PM
Christopher Bradford's Gravatar One caveat to this is that if the code run during your unit test has a cftransaction tag, the rollback call in tearDown() will fail. I've solved this by following the example of the Reactor ORM framework and passing in a parameter to any functions that use cftransaction so they can run the operation without a cftransaction when necessary. This is probably good practice anyway, as the consumer of my CFCs may want to do transaction management externally.
# Posted By Christopher Bradford | 4/23/08 8:25 PM
[Add Comment]
BlogCFC was created by Raymond Camden. This blog is running version 5.9. Contact Blog Owner