Rails - Aug 2005 - Testing of database creation and loading.

Our database''s schema is generated by a set of
scripts (all checked in, of course), and much
of the data in our database comes from external
sources (various commercial data sets).

It seem that "rake" today bypasses that process,
and instead just copies the schema from an
existing database that it assumes has been
created correctly.



I''d really like it if the "rake" test procedure
also ran (and tested!) the database creation
scripts.

I''d also really like it if the "rake" test
procedure also ran and tested the data-importers
for these tables with extra data sources.  Most
of these scripts are reading some pretty ugly
proprietary formats (exports from various legacy
systems our software integrates with) and this
is actually one of our most error prone parts of
the system in the greatest need of testing.



Are there any nice hooks in place so I can:

* Make rake run my own database-creation-script
   instead of copying from another database. and

* Instead of loading all tables from YML files,
   can I on a per-table (or per database) basis
   specify some other script to run to test the
   loading of these table from the original source
   data instead of the (less important to test)
   ability of loading them from yml?

> Are there any nice hooks in place so I can:
> 
> * Make rake run my own database-creation-script
>    instead of copying from another database. and
> 
> * Instead of loading all tables from YML files,
>    can I on a per-table (or per database) basis
>    specify some other script to run to test the
>    loading of these table from the original source
>    data instead of the (less important to test)
>    ability of loading them from yml?
The RakeFile is yours to do with.  Just modify the tasks and take out
the clone_structure_to_test task for unit testing.  As for fixtures:
just don''t load any and use your own method in the setup of your test
cases.


-- 
rick
http://techno-weenie.net