Grails WebTest Plugin 0.6 alpha

I've been working on committing some improvements to the Grails WebTest Plugin. You can download the alpha version here (I haven't yet released it to the plugin repository). I'd appreciate feedback from users with existing applications with non-trivial webtests regarding any regressions or upgrade issues they have. If all looks ok I will update the official repository version shortly.

Release Notes

• setUp/tearDown at the method and class level

  • classSetUp() and classTearDown() are run as individual test cases. SetUp() and tearDown() are run as the first and last steps of each test case.

• New superclass AutoWebTest

  • This new superclass will automatically run all methods starting with test. This saves you having to manually maintain the suite method unless you really want to for test order reasons.

  • AutoWebTest will also generate the test case name from the class and method name removing the need for repetitive webtest('blah'){...} code. The generated test name also makes it much easir to find the failing test from the generate reports.

  • MethodMissing code has been added so you can refactor a group of steps without having to wrap them in and ant.group closure.

  • You can now call config() as the first step in your test method to set WebTest options like host, port and ajax support

• -nostart option allows you to runthe tests against a server that is already running. It should come after run-webtest on the command line

• System parameters now passed through to WebTest. They need to be placed directly after grails on the command line e.g. grails -Dwt.headless=true run-webtest

  • -Dwt.headless=true to hide Swing monitor and stop browser launching

  • -Dserver.port=XXXX to get the tests to run against a server on a non-default port

• The plugin has been updated with the latest WebTest release which includes an update of HtmlUnit to version 2.3

• Application lib folder now on WebTest classpath. This avoids the need to duplicate/move libraries into webtest/home/lib

• Custom steps

  • You can now extend com.canoo.webtest.steps.Step by placing groovy classes in webtest/tests/step. They will be automatically loaded at runtime and allow for easy testing of complicated scenarios such as JSON interfaces and email integration

    • The last project I worked on used these custom steps to start, check then stop an embedded Wiser SMTP server for testing email functionality.

Upgrade Instructions

delete plugins/webtest-0.x

svn delete webtest/home, commit.

This avoids svn issues as the install script deletes the folder and extracts the latest build over the top, removing the .svn directories

grails install-plugin grails-webtest-0.6.zip

You need to copy the zip file into the root folder of your project and run the command there.