README

gsinclair/dfect
===============

Fork by Gavin Sinclair of Suraj N. Kurapati's 'dfect' testing library.

Things I like about dfect: simplicity, minimalism, good design.

Things I want to implement, with progress reports:

 * Minimal but useful output with meaningful failure messages
     - Completed in most/all cases; see below.
     - When asserting equality between two long strings, the _difference_
       between them is indicated for easier debugging.

 * Colourful output
     - Completed in most/all cases.

 * (A few) more assertions, like Eq for asserting equality
     - The following are implemented (test/unit equivalent in brackets):
        + Eq (assert_equal)
        + N  (assert_nil)
        + Mt (assert_match)
     - More to come as I need/want them.  Not aiming to add everything
       under the sun, though!

 * Facility for user-added assertions
     - No work done on this.

 * Easily select the tests you want to run
     - No work done on this.

 * Easily run the debugger when certain tests are executing
     - The global variable $dfect_test is set to the description of the
       currently-running test, meaning you can insert a line into your
       code like this:
          debugger if $dfect_test =~ /generate HTML/


Output
------

Here is a "screenshot" of a test failure in the project I'm working on.
Unfortunately it doesn't show the colour, which makes it much easier to read.
See links [1]-[3] below for true screenshots showing the colour.

    FAIL: TopicDocument (resources)
        ./test/topic_document.rb
           53   Eq r[0].category,     "F"
           54   Eq r[0].filetype,     "PDF"
        => 55   Eq r[0].file_re,      /^A030.+worksheet/
           56   Eq r[0].description, %{
           57     A summary of (nearly?) all the skills taught in this topic.
      Equality test failed
        Was: /^A030.+worksheet.pdf/
        Exp: /^A030.+worksheet/
      Backtrace
        ./test/topic_document.rb:55
        test/_all.rb:19


[1] http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/WyrF7D7I4sKnSNCz0RlBJw
[2] http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/N8kCnZ3U3wFqKBKKJM9Crg
[3] http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/7r2o1HWCjyEOhjc7o1nluQ


Contact
-------

gsinclair at gmail dot com