Working With Rails

Spider Test

SpiderTester is an automated integration-testing script that iterates over every page in your application. It performs a few valuable tasks for you:

- parses the html of every page, so if you have invalid html, you will be warned.
- finds every link to within your site and follows it, whether static or dynamic.
- finds every Ajax.Updater link and follows it.
- finds every form and tries to submit it, filling in values where possible.

This is helpful in determining:

- missing static pages (.html)
- poor code coverage - forgot to test a file?  Don't wait for a user to find it.
- simple fuzzing of form values.
- automated testing of form paths.  Often we have forms which point to incorrect
  locations, and up until now this has been impossible to test in an automated fashion
  or without being strongly coupled to your code.

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USAGE

$ script/plugin install svn://caboo.se/plugins/court3nay/spider_test $ script/generate integration_test spider_test

Load up the test/integration/spider_test.rb and make it look something like this, replacing your own implementation details where appropriate. You’ll probably want to load all of your fixtures.

require "#{File.dirname(FILE)}/../test_helper"

class SpiderTest < ActionController::IntegrationTest
  fixtures :users, :roles, :images, :categories
  include SpiderIntegrator

def test_spider
  get '/'
  assert_response :success
end

spider(@response.body, '/')

end

If you require a login for your app, you’ll need to specifically log in. I do it like:

require "#{File.dirname(FILE)}/../test_helper"

class SpiderTest < ActionController::IntegrationTest
  fixtures :users, :roles, :images, :categories
  include SpiderIntegrator

def test_spider
  get '/sessions/new'
  assert_response :success
  post '/sessions/create', :login => 'admin', :password => 'test'
  assert session[:user]
  assert_response :redirect
  assert_redirected_to '/'
  follow_redirect!
end

spider(@response.body, '/')

end

Todo:

- better, aka more random, fuzzing.
  currently, I check the fieldname and change the data types accordingly.  It'd be
  good to have some more advanced algorithm in here

- specify which actions to ignore
  you can modify this by editing the plugin and setting @visited_urls and @visited_forms
  but this should be more easily settable.

- use hpricot instead of html::document
  no clue, really, but I hear hpricot is faster.

x better capturing of errors
  instead of dying each time there's an error, store them all up so the user can fix
  'em all at once.

Changelog:

SVN Better capturing of errors (waits until the end to display the errors or missing pages) More fun status dots (! for error, ? for missing file)

0.1 : Initial release

NOTE: This description has been extracted from the Plugin README and so the formatting may need updating to make browser friendly