Just a Theory

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Posts about Test::XPath

Testing Catalyst Template::Declare Views

Now that we have our default Catalyst tests passing, let’s have a look at testing the views we’ve created. You can follow along via the Part 6 tag tag in the GitHub repository. Start by looking at the default test script for our HTML view, t/view_HTML.t. It should look something like this:

use strict;
use warnings;
use Test::More tests => 3;
# use Test::XPath;

BEGIN {
    use_ok 'MyApp::View::HTML' or die;
    use_ok 'MyApp' or die;
}

ok my $view = MyApp->view('HTML'), 'Get HTML view object';

# ok my $output = $view->render(undef, 'hello', { user => 'Theory' }),
#     'Render the "hello" template';

# Test output using Test::XPath or similar.
# my $tx = Test::XPath->new( xml => $output, is_html => 1);
# $tx->ok('/html', 'Should have root html element');
# $tx->is('/html/head/title', 'Hello, Theory', 'Title should be correct');

Yeah, this looks a bit different that the view test created for Template Toolkit or Mason views. That’s because Catalyst::View::TD ships with its own test script template. One of the advantage is that it shows off testing the view without having to instantiate the entire app or send mock HTTP requests. These are unit tests, after all: we want to make sure that the view templates do what they want, not test an entire request process. The latter is more appropriate for integration tests, which I’ll cover later.

So let’s have a look at this test script. The first commented-out statement is:

# ok my $output = $view->render(undef, 'hello', { user => 'Theory' }),
#     'Render the "hello" template';

What this is showing us is that one can use the view’s render() method to execute a view without a context object, thus saving the expense of initializing the application. And if you have templates that don’t rely on it, I highly recommend this approach for keeping your tests fast. Even if the use of the the context object is fairly minimal, you can use Test::MockObject to mock up a context object like so:

use Test::MockObject;
my $c = Test::MockObject->new;
$c->mock(uri_for => sub { $_[1] });
$c->mock(config  => sub { { name => 'MyApp' } });
$c->mock(debug   => sub { });
$c->mock(log     => sub { });

ok my $output = $view->render($c, 'hello', { user => 'Theory' }),
    'Render the "hello" template';

Then you can use the mock() method to mock more methods as your template uses them.

Alas, our app has already passed the point where that seems worthwhile. So far we have just one template, books/list, and it requires that there also be a database statement handle available. Sure we could create a database connection and prepare a statement handle. But that would start to require a fair bit more code to set up. So let’s just instantiate the application object and be done with it. Change the test plan to 5:

use Test::More tests => 5;

Then change the test body after the BEGIN block to:

# Instantiate the context object and the view.
ok my $c = MyApp->new, 'Create context object';
ok my $view = $c->view('HTML'), 'Get HTML view object';

# Create a statement handle for books/list.
my $sth = $c->conn->run(sub { $_->prepare(q{
    SELECT isbn, title, rating, authors FROM books_with_authors
}) });
$sth->execute;

# Render books/list.
ok my $output = $view->render($c, 'books/list', {
    title => 'Book List',
    books => $sth,
}), 'Render the "books/list" template';

This allows us to get a full test of the view.

% prove --lib --verbose t/view_HTML.t
t/view_HTML.t .. 
1..5
ok 1 - use MyApp::View::HTML;
ok 2 - use MyApp;
ok 3 - Create context object
ok 4 - Get HTML view object
Explicit blessing to '' (assuming package main) at /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.10.1/Catalyst.pm line 1281.
Explicit blessing to '' (assuming package main) at /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.10.1/Catalyst.pm line 1281.
Explicit blessing to '' (assuming package main) at /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.10.1/Catalyst.pm line 1281.
Explicit blessing to '' (assuming package main) at /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.10.1/Catalyst.pm line 1281.
ok 5 - Render the "books/list" template
ok
All tests successful.
Files=1, Tests=5,  1 wallclock secs ( 0.02 usr  0.00 sys +  0.69 cusr  0.06 csys =  0.77 CPU)
Result: PASS

Hrm. Those warnings are rather annoying. Looking at Catalyst.pm I see that they come from the uri_for() method. I expect that they somehow result from a lack of state in the context object. That’s not really important for our unit tests, so let’s just mock that one method to do something reasonable. Add this code after instantiating the context object but before rendering the view:

use Test::MockObject::Extends;
my $mocker = Test::MockObject::Extends->new($c);
$mocker->mock( uri_for => sub { $_[1]} );

And now we get:

% prove --lib --verbose t/view_HTML.t
t/view_HTML.t .. 
1..5
ok 1 - use MyApp::View::HTML;
ok 2 - use MyApp;
ok 3 - Create context object
ok 4 - Get HTML view object
ok 5 - Render the "books/list" template
ok
All tests successful.
Files=1, Tests=5,  1 wallclock secs ( 0.02 usr  0.01 sys +  0.77 cusr  0.07 csys =  0.87 CPU)
Result: PASS

Ah, much better! And thanks to our mock, we also have a much better idea of what will be returned from uri_for(), which will be important for later tests.

Now that we have things properly mocked up and the objects created such that we can actually get the template to render, it’s time to test the output from the template. For HTML and XML format, I like the Test::XPath module. In fact, it’s for this very use that I wrote Test::XPath. It’s great because it allows me to effectively test the correctness of the template output. Here’s the basic outline:

# Test output using Test::XPath.
my $tx = Test::XPath->new( xml => $output, is_html => 1);
test_basics($tx, 'Book List');

# Call this function for every request to make sure that they all
# have the same basic structure.
sub test_basics {
    my ($tx, $title) = @_;

    # Some basic sanity-checking.
    $tx->is( 'count(/html)',      1, 'Should have 1 html element' );
    $tx->is( 'count(/html/head)', 1, 'Should have 1 head element' );
    $tx->is( 'count(/html/body)', 1, 'Should have 1 body element' );

    # Check the head element.
    $tx->is(
        '/html/head/title',
        $title,
        'Title should be corect'
    );
    $tx->is(
        '/html/head/link[@type="text/css"][@rel="stylesheet"]/@href',
        '/static/css/main.css',
        'Should load the CSS',
    );
}

I’ve set up the test_basics() function to test the things that should be mostly the same for every request. This will mainly cover the output of the wrapper, and includes things like making sure that there is just one <html> tag, one <head> tag, and one <body> tag; and that the title and CSS-related elements are output properly. Running this (with the test plan set to no_plan as I develop), I get:

% prove --lib t/view_HTML.tt
t/view_HTML.t .. 2/? 
#   Failed test 'Should load the CSS'
#   at t/view_HTML.t line 52.
#          got: ''
#     expected: '/static/css/main.css'
# Looks like you failed 1 test of 10.
t/view_HTML.t .. Dubious, test returned 1 (wstat 256, 0x100)
Failed 1/10 subtests 

Test Summary Report
-------------------
t/view_HTML.t (Wstat: 256 Tests: 10 Failed: 1)
  Failed test:  10
  Non-zero exit status: 1
Files=1, Tests=10,  1 wallclock secs ( 0.02 usr  0.01 sys +  0.79 cusr  0.08 csys =  0.90 CPU)
Result: FAIL

Hrm. Let’s stick a diag $output in there and see what we get. Now the output includes this bit:

# <html>
#  <head>
#   <title>Book List</title>
#   <link rel="stylesheet" href="/static/css/main.css" />
#  </head>

Ah! the <link> element for the stylesheet is missing the type attribute. So let’s add it. Edit lib/MyApp/Templates/HTML.pm and change the proper bit of the wrapper template to:

link {
    rel is 'stylesheet';
    type is 'text/css';
    href is $c->uri_for('/static/css/main.css' );
};

Note the addition of the type attribute. Now when we run the tests (removing the diag), we get:

% prove --lib t/view_HTML.t
t/view_HTML.t .. ok    
All tests successful.
Files=1, Tests=10,  1 wallclock secs ( 0.02 usr  0.00 sys +  0.78 cusr  0.07 csys =  0.87 CPU)
Result: PASS

Ah, much better! A lot more testing should go in there to make sure that the wrapper is doing things right. I’ve committed such testing, so check it out.

Now we need to test the output specific to the books/list template. Below the call to test_basics(), add this code:

$tx->ok('/html/body/div[@id="bodyblock"]/div[@id="content"]/table', sub {
    $_->is('count(./tr)', 6, 'Should have seven rows' );
    $_->ok('./tr[1]', sub {
        $_->is('count(./th)', 3, 'Should have three table headers');
        $_->is('./th[1]', 'Title', '... first is "Title"');
        $_->is('./th[2]', 'Rating', '... second is "Rating"');
        $_->is('./th[3]', 'Authors', '... third is "Authors"');
    }, 'Should have first table row')
}, 'Should have a table');

Notice the nested block there? Test::XPath supports passing blocks to its ok() method, so that you can naturally scope your tests to blocks of XML and HTML. Neat, huh? If you don’t like the use of $_, the test object is also passed as the sole argument to such blocks.

Anyway, these tests makes sure that the table is where it should be, has the proper number of rows, and that the first row has three headers with their proper values. The test outputs:

% prove --lib t/view_HTML.tt
t/view_HTML.t .. 1/? 
#   Failed test '... third is "Authors"'
#   at t/view_HTML.t line 42.
#          got: 'Author'
#     expected: 'Authors'
# Looks like you failed 1 test of 28.
t/view_HTML.t .. Dubious, test returned 1 (wstat 256, 0x100)
Failed 1/28 subtests 

Test Summary Report
-------------------
t/view_HTML.t (Wstat: 256 Tests: 28 Failed: 1)
  Failed test:  28
  Non-zero exit status: 1
Files=1, Tests=28,  1 wallclock secs ( 0.03 usr  0.01 sys +  0.79 cusr  0.08 csys =  0.91 CPU)
Result: FAIL

Whoops! Looks like I forgot to change the header when I changed the template to output a list of authors last week. So edit lib/MyApp/Templates/HTML/Books.pm and change the template to output “Authors” instead of “Author”:

row {
    th { 'Title'   };
    th { 'Rating'  };
    th { 'Authors' };
};

And now all tests pass again:

% prove --lib t/view_HTML.t
t/view_HTML.t .. ok    
All tests successful.
Files=1, Tests=28,  1 wallclock secs ( 0.02 usr  0.01 sys +  0.78 cusr  0.09 csys =  0.90 CPU)
Result: PASS

Great. So let’s finish testing the rest of the output. Ah, but wait! We have on ORDER BY clause on the query, so the order in which the books will be output is undefined. So let’s add an ORDER BY clause. Change the creation of the statement handle in the test file to:

my $sth = $c->conn->run(sub { $_->prepare(q{
    SELECT isbn, title, rating, authors
        FROM books_with_authors
        ORDER BY title
}) });

And now you can start to see why I use the q{} operator for SQL queries. You should also note that the inputs for the view test are now different than those from the controller, which still has no ORDER BY clause. It’s likely that we’ll want to go back and change that later, but I bring it up here to highlight the difference from integration tests – and to emphasize that we’ll need to write those integration tests at some point!

But back to the view unit tests. We can now test the contents of the table by adding code after the test for ./tr[1]. Here’s what the test for the next row looks like:

$_->ok('./tr[2]', sub {
    $_->is('count(./td)', 3, 'Should have three cells');
    $_->is(
        './td[1]',
        'CCSP SNRS Exam Certification Guide',
        '... first is "CCSP SNRS Exam Certification Guide"'
    );
    $_->is('./td[2]', 5, '... second is "5"');
    $_->is(
        './td[3]',
        'Bastien, Nasseh, Degu',
        '... third is "Bastien, Nasseh, Degu"',
    );
}, 'Should have second table row');

The other rows can be similarly tested; have a look at the commit to see all the new tests.

This reminds me, however, that we never created an order for the list of authors. So it’s possible that this test could fail, as the order of the author last names is undefined. We should go back and fix that, probably by listing the authors as they are actually listed on the cover of the book. But in the meantime, our test of this view is done.

Next up, I think I’ll hit controller tests. So come on back!

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Use Rubyish Blocks with Test::XPath

Thanks to the slick Devel::Declare-powered PerlX::MethodCallWithBlock created by gugod, the latest version of Test::XPath supports Ruby-style blocks. The Ruby version of assert_select, as I mentioned previously, looks like this:

assert_select "ol" { |elements|
  elements.each { |element|
    assert_select element, "li", 4
  }
}

I’ve switched to the brace syntax for greater parity with Perl. Test::XPath, meanwhile, looks like this:

my @css = qw(foo.css bar.css);
$tx->ok( '/html/head/style', sub {
    my $css = shift @css;
    shift->is( './@src', $css, "Style src should be $css");
}, 'Should have style' );

But as of Test::XPath 0.13, you can now just use PerlX::MethodCallWithBlock to pass blocks in the Rubyish way:

use PerlX::MethodCallWithBlock;
my @css = qw(foo.css bar.css);
$tx->ok( '/html/head/style', 'Should have style' ) {
    my $css = shift @css;
    shift->is( './@src', $css, "Style src should be $css");
};

Pretty slick, eh? It required a single-line change to the source code. I’m really happy with this sugar. Thanks for the great hack, gugod!

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Test XML and HTML with XPath

When I was hacking Rails projects back in 2006-2007, there was a lot of stuff about Rails that drove me absolutely batshit (<cough>ActiveRecord</cough>), but there were also a (very) few things that I really liked. One of those things was the assert_select test method. There was a bunch of magic involved in sending a request to your Rails app and stuffing the body someplace hidden (hrm, that sounds kind of evil; intentional?), but then you could call assert_select to use CSS selectors to test the structure and content of the document (assuming, of course, that it was HTML or XML). For example, (to borrow from the Rails docs), if you wanted to test that a response contains two ordered lists, each with four list elements then you’d do something like this:

assert_select "ol" do |elements|
    elements.each do |element|
    assert_select element, "li", 4
    end
end

What it does is select all of the <ol> elements and pass them to the do block, where you can call assert_select on each of them. Nice, huh? You can also implicitly call assert_select on the entire array of passed elements, like so:

assert_select "ol" do
    assert_select "li", 8
end

Slick, right? I’ve always wanted to have something like this in Perl, but until last week, I didn’t really have an immediate need for it. But I’ve started on a Catalyst project with my partners at PGX, and of course I’m using a view to generate XHTML output. So I started asking around for advice on proper unit testing for Catalyst views. The answer I got was, basically, Test::WWW::Mechanize::Catalyst. But I found it insufficient:

$mech->get_ok("/");
$mech->html_lint_ok( "HTML should be valid" );
$mech->title_is( "Root", "On the root page" );
$mech->content_contains( "This is the root page", "Correct content" );

Okay, I can check the title of the document directly, which is kind of cool, but there’s no other way to examine the structure? Really? And to check the content, there’s just content_contains(), which concatenates all of the content without any tags! This is useful for certain very simple tests, but if you want to make sure that your document is properly structured, and the content is in all the right places, you’re SOL.

Furthermore, the html_link_ok() method didn’t like the Unicode characters output by my view:

#   Failed test 'HTML should be valid (http://localhost/)'
#   at t/view_TD.t line 30.
# HTML::Lint errors for http://localhost/
#  (4:3) Invalid character \x2019 should be written as &rsquo;
#  (18:5) Invalid character \xA9 should be written as &copy;
# 2 errors on the page

Of course, those characters aren’t invalid, they’re perfectly good UTF-8 characters. In some worlds, I suppose, they should be wrong, but I actually want them in my document.

So I switched to Test::XML, which uses a proper XML parser to validate a document:

ok my $res = request("http://localhost:3000/"), "Request home page";
ok $res->is_success, "Request should have succeeded";

is_well_formed_xml $res->content, "The HTML should be well-formed";

Cool, so now I know that my XHTML document is valid, it’s time to start examining the content and structure in more detail. Thinking fondly on assert_select, I went looking for a test module that uses XPath to test an XML document, and found Test::XML::XPath right in the Test::XML distribution, which looked to be just what I wanted. So I added it to my test script and added this line to test the content of the <title> tag:

is_xpath $res->content, "/html/head/title", "Welcome!";

I ran the test…and waited. It took around 20 seconds for that test to run, and then it failed!

#   Failed test at t/view_TD.t line 25.
#          got: ''
#     expected: 'Welcome!'
#   evaluating: /html/head/title
#      against: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
# <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">
#  <head>
#   <title>Welcome!</title>
#  </head>
# </html>

No doubt the alert among my readership will spot the problem right away, but I was at a loss. Fortunately, Ovid was over for dinner last week, and he pointed out that it was due to the namespace. That is, the xmlns attribute of the <html> element requires that one register a namespace prefix to use in the XPath expression. He pointed me to his fork of XML::XPath, called Test::XHTML::XPath, in his Escape project. It mostly duplicates Test::XML::XPath, but contains this crucial line of code:

$xpc->registerNs( x => "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" );

By registering the prefix “x” for the XHTML namespace, he’s able to write tests like this:

is_xpath $res->content, "/x:html/x:head/x:title", "Welcome!";

And that works. It seems that the XPath spec requires that one use prefixes when referring to elements within a namespace. Test::XML::XPath, alas, provides no way to register a namespace prefix.

Perhaps worse is the performance problem. I discovered that if I stripped out the DOCTYPE declaration from the XHTML before I passed it to is_xpath, the test was lightning fast. Here the issue is that XML::LibXML, used by Test::XML::XPath, is fetching the DTD from the w3.org Web site as the test runs. I can disable this by setting the no_network and recover_silently XML::LibXML options, but, again, Test::XML::XPath provides no way to do so.

Add to that the fact that Test::XML::XPath has no interface for recursive testing like assert_select and I was ready to write my own module. One could perhaps update Test::XML::XPath to be more flexible, but for the fact that it falls back on XML::XPath when it can’t find XML::LibXML, and XML::XPath, alas, behaves differently than XML::LibXML (it didn’t choke on my lack of a namespace prefix, for example). So if you ship an application that uses Test::XML::XPath, tests might fail on other systems where it would use a different XPath module than you used.

And so I have written a new test module.

Introducing Test::XPath, your Perl module for flexibly running XPath-powered tests on the content and structure of your XML and HTML documents. With this new module, the test for my Catalyst application becomes:

my $tx = Test::XPath->new( xml => $res->content, is_html => 1 );
$tx->is("/html/head/title", "Welcome", "Title should be correct" );

Notice how I didn’t need a namespace prefix there? That’s because the is_html parameter coaxes XML::LibXML into using its HTML parser instead of its XML parser. One of the side-effects of doing so is that the namespace appears to be assumed, so I can ignore it in my tests. The HTML parser doesn’t bother to fetch the DTD, either. For tests where you really need namespaces, you’d do this:

my $tx = Test::XPath->new(
    xml     => $res->content,
    xmlns   => { x => "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" },
    options => { no_network => 1, recover_silently => 1 },
);
$tx->is("/x:html/x:head/x:title", "Welcome", "Title should be correct" );

Yep, you can specify XML namespace prefixes via the xmlns parameter, and pass options to XML::LibXML via the options parameter. Here I’ve shut off the network, so that XML::LibXML prevents network access, and told it to recover silently when it tries to fetch the DTD, but fails (because, you know, it can’t access the network). Not bad, eh?

Of course, the module provides the usual array of Test::More-like test methods, including ok(), is(), like() and cmp_ok(). They all work just like in Test::More, except that the first argument must be an XPath expressions. Some examples borrowed from the documentation:

$tx->ok( '//foo/bar', 'Should have bar element under foo element' );
$tx->ok( 'contains(//title, "Welcome")', 'Title should "Welcome"' );

$tx->is( '/html/head/title', 'Welcome', 'Title should be welcoming' );
$tx->isnt( '/html/head/link/@type', 'hello', 'Link type should not' );

$tx->like( '/html/head/title', qr/^Foobar Inc.: .+/, 'Title context' );
$tx->unlike( '/html/head/title', qr/Error/, 'Should be no error in title' );

$tx->cmp_ok( '/html/head/title', 'eq', 'Welcome' );
$tx->cmp_ok( '//story[1]/@id', '==', 1 );

But the real gem is the recursive testing feature of the ok() test method. By passing a code reference as the second argument, you can descend into various parts of your XML or HTML document to test things more deeply. ok() will pass if the XPath expression argument selects one or more nodes, and then it will call the code reference for each of those nodes, passing the Test::XPath object as the first argument. This is a bit different than assert_select, but I view the reduced magic as a good thing.

For example, if you wanted to test for the presence of <story> elements in your document, and to test that each such element had an incremented id attribute, you’d do something like this:

my $i = 0;
$tx->ok( '//assets/story', sub {
    shift->is('./@id', ++$i, "ID should be $i in story $i");
}, 'Should have story elements' );

For convenience, the XML::XPath object is also assigned to $_ for the duration of the call to the code reference. Either way, you can call ok() and pass code references anywhere in the hierarchy. For example, to ensure that an Atom feed has entries and that each entry has a title, a link, and a very specific author element with name, uri, and email subnodes, you can do this:

$tx->ok( '/feed/entry', sub {
    $_->ok( './title', 'Should have a title' );
    $_->ok( './author', sub {
        $_->is( './name',  'Larry Wall',       'Larry should be author' );
        $_->is( './uri',   'http://wall.org/', 'URI should be correct' );
        $_->is( './email', 'perl@example.com', 'Email should be right' );
    }, 'Should have author elements' );
}, 'Should have entry elements' );

There are a lot of core XPath functions you can use, too. For example, I’m going to write a test for every page returned by my application to make sure that I have the proper numbers of various tags:

$tx->is('count(/html)',     1, 'Should have 1 html element' );
$tx->is('count(/html/head') 1, 'Should have 1 head element' );
$tx->is('count(/html/body)  1, 'Should have 1 body element' );

I’m going to use this module to the hilt in all my tests for HTML and XML documents from here on in. The only thing I’m missing from assert_select is that it supports CSS 2 selectors, rather than XPath expressions, and the implementation offers quite a few other features including regular expression operators for matching attributes, pseudo-classes, and other fun stuff. Still, XPath gets me all that I need; the rest is just sugar, really. And with the ability to define custom XPath functions in Perl, I can live without the extra sugar.

Maybe you’ll find it useful, too.

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