Writing library tests

Note

Generally we don’t “unit test” the lower levels of Xapian

A common convention in a lot of software is to write unit tests, testing individual units of source code. In Xapian we generally do not test the lower levels separately. Instead, we write tests that use Xapian’s public API.

So for instance, we don’t write unit tests for our ::Internal classes. So if you make a change to Xapian::Weight::Internal you wouldn’t write a test for that change directly. However, your changes are motivated by a desire to add certain behaviour to the library. This generally will be new functionality via the API, which you can write a test for. Sometimes it will be what is sometimes called “non-functional behaviour”, such as speed of operation or memory usage. These may be harder to write tests for, and are worth discussing with other members of the community to figure out the best way to test them.

This means that our tests are often testing a more complex bundle of functionality than you may be used to from unit tests. You can think of most of Xapian’s test suite as automated functional tests.

Test programs live in tests/. They mostly use a standard test harness, in tests/harness/, which wraps each test, reports results, and generally packages things up nicely. The test harness counts how many testcases pass/fail/skip, catches signals and unhandled exceptions, and so forth. It can also also check for memory leaks and accesses to uninitialised values by making use of valgrind, for platforms which valgrind supports (configure automatically enables use of valgrind if a suitably recent version is detected).

A typical test program has three parts: the tests themselves (at the top), a table of tests (at the bottom), and a tiny main which sets the test harness in motion. It uses the table to figure out what the tests are called, and what function to call to run them.

Incidentally, when fixing bugs, it’s often better to write the test before fixing the bug. Firstly, it’s easier to assure yourself that the bug is (a) genuine, and (b) fixed, because you see the test go from fail to pass (though sometimes you don’t get the testcase quite right, so this isn’t doesn’t always work as well as it should). Secondly you’re more likely to write the test carefully, because once you’ve fixed something there’s often a feeling that you should commit it for the good of the world, which tends to distract you.

The framework is done for you, so you don’t need to worry about that much. You are responsible for doing two things:

  • writing a minimal test or tests for the feature
  • adding that test to the list of tests to be run

Adding the test is simple. There’s a test_desc array in each file that comprises a set of tests (I’ll come to that in a minute), and you just add another entry. The entry is an array consisting of a name for the test and a pointer to the function that is the test. Easy. The procedure is even simpler for apitest tests - there you just use DEFINE_TESTCASE to define your new testcase, and a script picks it up and makes sure it is run.

Look at the bottom of tests/stemtest.cc for the test_desc array. Now look up about 20 lines to where the test functions are defined. You need to write a function like these. There are a bunch of macros to help you perform standards testing tasks, such as TEST_EQUAL, which are all in tests/harness/testsuite.h. They’re pretty simple to use.

API tests

The most important test system for most people will be apitest. This also uses the test harness, but has several tables of tests to be run depending what facilities each backend supports. A lot of the work is done by macros and helper functions, which may make it hard to work out quite what is going on, but make life easier once you’ve grasped what’s going on. The main() function and other bits are in apitest.cc, and tests themselves are in various other C++ files starting api_. Each one of these has its own tables for various different groups of tests (eg: api_db.cc, which performs tests on the API that require a database backend, has basic tests, a few specialised groups that only contain one or two tests, tests that require a writable database, tests that require a local database, and finally tests that require a remote database).

To add a new api test, figure out what the test will be dependent on and put it in the appropriate place (eg: if adding a test for a bug that occurs while writing to a database, you want a writable database, so you add a test to api_db.cc and reference it in the writabledb_tests table).

Currently, there’s api_nodb.cc (no db required, largely testing query construction and boundary conditions), api_posdb.cc (db with positional information required) and api_db.cc (everything else, with lots of subgroups of tests). It’s easiest to base a test on an existing one.

You’ll notice in apitest.cc that it runs all appropriate test groups against each backend that is being built. The backends are inmemory, multi, glass, honey, remoteprog and remotetcp. If you need to create a new test group with different requirements to any current ones, put it in the appropriate api_ file (or create a new one, and add it into Makefile.am) and remember to add the group to all pertinent backends in apitest.cc.

Test databases

Many of the automated tests work by building a small test database and then testing a particular library feature against it. To make things easier, the test harness provides a way of doing this without having to write indexing code for every test.

Typically you use this by starting your test case with:

Xapian::Database db(get_database("dataset"));

which would then index the data in tests/testdata/dataset.txt and return an open database object.

You can also get an empty writable database, giving it a name:

Xapian::WritableDatabase db(get_named_writable_database("testdbname"));

The actual database files are generally put into tests/.<dbtype> using either the name (for get_named_writable_database() or the dataset(s) used. So you can end up with database paths such as:

tests/.glass/db__apitest_allterms
tests/.honey/db__apitest_allterms

The various functions that support this are declared in the header tests/apitest.h, and tests/harness/backendmanager.h contains doc comments that will help. (The functions pass through to the particular backend manager being used.)