R – NAnt, MbUnit, CruiseControl, Selenium – passing settings to the test assembly

cruisecontrol.netmbunitnantselenium

I am putting together some ideas for our automated testing platform and have been looking at Selenium for the test runner.

I am wrapping the recorded Selenium C# scripts in an MbUnit test, which is being triggered via the MbUnit NAnt task. The Selenium test client is created as follows:

selenium = new DefaultSelenium("host", 4444, "*iexplore", "http://[url]/");

How can I pass the host, port and url settings into the test so their values can be controlled via the NAnt task?

For example, I may have multiple Selenium RC servers listening and I want to use the same test code passing in each server address instead of embedding the settings within the tests themselves.

I have an approach mocked up using a custom NAnt task I have written but it is not the most elegant solution at present and I wondered if there was an easier way to accomplish what I want to do.

Many thanks if anyone can help.

Best Answer

Thanks for the responses so far.

Environment variables could work, however, we could be running parallel tests via a single test assembly so I wouldn't want settings to be overwritten during execution, which could break another test. Interesting line of thought though, thanks, I reckon I could use that in other areas.

My current solution involves a custom NAnt task build on top of the MbUnit task, which allows me to specify the additional host, port, url settings as attributes. These are then saved as a config file within the build directory and then read in by the test assemblies. This feels a bit "clunky" to me as my tests need to inherit from a specific class. Not too bad but I'd like to have less dependencies and concentrate on the testing.

Maybe I am worrying too much!!

Related Solutions

Using MBUnit in TeamCity

Gallio now has an extension to output TeamCity service messages. Just use the included Gallio.NAntTasks.dll and enable the TeamCity extension. (this won't be necessary in the next release)

C# – How to get the path of the assembly the code is in

I've defined the following property as we use this often in unit testing.

public static string AssemblyDirectory
{
    get
    {
        string codeBase = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().CodeBase;
        UriBuilder uri = new UriBuilder(codeBase);
        string path = Uri.UnescapeDataString(uri.Path);
        return Path.GetDirectoryName(path);
    }
}

The Assembly.Location property sometimes gives you some funny results when using NUnit (where assemblies run from a temporary folder), so I prefer to use CodeBase which gives you the path in URI format, then UriBuild.UnescapeDataString removes the File:// at the beginning, and GetDirectoryName changes it to the normal windows format.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Using MBUnit in TeamCity

C# – How to get the path of the assembly the code is in

Related Topic