Following Test-Driven Development (TDD) best practices (and BDD best practices as well), unit tests should be written and executed during MetacatUI code development - not after features are already developed.

We currently use the Mocha framework for running unit and integration tests, along with the Chai assertion library.

• Unit and Integration tests are separated into different directories and files.
  • Unit tests are in: metacatui/test/js/specs/unit
  • Integration tests are in: metacatui/test/js/specs/integration
• Directories inside unit and integration should match the MetacatUI source code directory structure for easy readability.
  • So, for example, the EMLEntityModel located in metacatui/src/js/models/metadata/eml211/EMLEntity.js has a corresponding spec file in metacatui/test/js/specs/unit/models/metadata/eml211/EMLEntity.spec.js

We've chosen to use behavior driven development (BDD) style of tests, and so write specs with the should() and expect() methods rather than assert().

You can use EMLEntity.spec.js as a template for writing other spec files, but in general, use the RequireJS define() method to define a module and inject dependencies, such as:

    define(["../../../../../../src/js/models/metadata/eml211/EMLEntity"],
        function(EMLEntity) {
        // spec code goes here
    });

The test suite to be run is defined in test/config/tests.json. Paths to new spec test files are added to the unit or integration array. Tests are run in order, so add the new test in the position that makes most sense.

⭐️⭐️⭐️ 🆕 The script test/scripts/generate-tests.py can be used to generate new test files with the basic elements set up to start creating unit tests. See the README for more information. ⭐️⭐️⭐️

All unit tests are run by default. To run the unit test suite, serve the index.html file via a Node Express server:

npm run test

and view the tests in a web browser by going to the localhost address printed out (e.g. http://localhost:3001).

Integration tests are not run by default, since they are most resource and time intensive. To run the integration test suite follow the above steps for unit tests, but pass the integration test type as a search parameter:

http://localhost:3001/test/?type=integration

Note: For convienence, there is a node script called integration-test that will redirect requests to the root http://localhost:3001 to http://localhost:3001/test/?type=integration, but that node script is not necessary to run the integration tests.

Tests are executed using the app configuration in /test/config/appconfig.json. Change that appconfig.json file to run integration tests against a specific Metacat instance or to test certain AppConfig options. The appconfig.json JSON is the same namespace as the MetacatUI AppConfig.