[hunchentoot-devel] Unit testing Hunchentoot websites

[Vamsee Kanakala]

Slava Akhmechet wrote:
> I'm building a web framework on top of Hunchentoot and I ran into
> problems while trying to unit test some of my code. Essentially I need
> to unit test behavior that happens accross requests. I want to do it
> without starting Hunchentoot by faking the necessary objects (request,
> session, etc.)
> 

I had a similar problem, and I guess my not very elegant solution was to
create a dummy-request class, which basically has the same slots as that
of hunchentoot::request, and you can set parameters like so, and set the
dummy request instance to *request*:

(defclass dummy-request ()
  ((headers-in :initarg :headers-in :initform nil)
   (method :initarg :method)
   (uri :initarg :uri)
   (server-protocol :initarg :server-protocol)
   (content-stream :initarg :content-stream
                   :reader content-stream)
   (cookies-in :initform nil)
   (get-parameters :initform nil)
   (post-parameters :initform nil)
   (script-name :initform nil)
   (query-string :initform nil)
   (session :initform nil
            :accessor hunchentoot::session)
   (aux-data :initform nil
             :accessor hunchentoot::aux-data)
   (raw-post-data :initform nil)))

And then:

(let ((*request* (make-instance 'dummy-request)))
  (setf (slot-value *request* 'method) :post)
  (setf (slot-value *request* 'post-parameters)
         '(("id" . "10") ("name" . "Chicago")))

And you can access this in the regular way:

(setf some-var (get-parameter "id"))

I found out that setting some vars like hunchentoot::*session-secret*
properly and doing a start-session lets you use session within a test
happily. For most tests that use session/request related code, I do
something like this and put it in a macro:

(let* ((hunchentoot::*remote-host* "localhost")
	(hunchentoot::*session-secret* 			(hunchentoot::reset-session-secret))
	(hunchentoot::*reply* (make-instance 'hunchentoot::reply))
	  (*request* (make-instance 'dummy-request))
	  (*session* (start-session)))

I'm not sure if this is the best way to do this, but this approach works
fine for me.

HTH,
Vamsee.