Testing cherrypy with nose/fixture/webtest (amidoinitrite)

Question

I am developing a CherryPy application and I want to write some automated tests for it. I chose to use nosetests for it. The application uses sqlalchemy as db backend so I need to use fixture package to provide fixed datasets. Also I want to do webtests. Here is how I set it all together:

I have a helper function init_model(test = False) in the file where all models are created. It connects to the production or test (if test == True or cherrypy.request.app.test == True) database and calls create_all

Then I have created a base class for tests like this:

class BaseTest(DataTestCase):
def __init__(self):
    init_model(True)
    application.test = True
    self.app = TestApp(application)
    self.fixture = SQLAlchemyFixture(env = models, engine = meta.engine, style = NamedDataStyle())
    self.datasets = (
        # all the datasets go here
        )

And now I do my tests by creating child classes of BaseTest and calling self.app.some_method()

This is my first time doing tests in python and all this seems very complicated. I want to know if I am using the mentioned packages as their authors intended and if it's not overcomplicated.

Answer 1

That looks mostly like normal testing glue for a system of any size. In other words, it's not overly-complicated.

In fact, I'd suggest slightly more complexity in one respect: I think you're going to find setting up a new database in each child test class to be really slow. It's more common to at least set up all your tables once per run instead of once per class. Then, you either have each test method create all the data it needs for its own sake, and/or you run each test case in a transaction and roll it all back in a finally: block.