Should I make plugin tests project-independent?

rubyonrails-core
1

Hi,

I'm working on a patch for the official auto_complete plugin. I noticed that a lot of the new plugins (e.g. acts_as_tree) are set up to be testable outside of a rails project. Is this now considered best practice? If so I'll make that change while I'm working on the plugin.

Thanks, Krishna

2

Yes. However, there is no real official way to do it.

At some point there may be an official plugin_test_helper you'll be able to require. Maybe I'll look into this kind of thing this week.

3

I think it's preferable if you can assume that the rails gem is available. Some kind of plugin test helper would indeed be pretty nice though. Have it check for vendor/rails or a specific GEM version (or not, if it's an edge-only plugin).

4

Thanks for the quick response, Josh and Rick.

Krishna

5

We released a plugin/gem that provides support for this type of thing:

http://wiki.pluginaweek.org/Plugin_test_helper

We use it in many of our own plugins.

6

I should mention here are a few examples of its usage (besides the README):

http://svn.practical.cc/plugins/acts_as_tokenized http://svn.pluginaweek.org/trunk/plugins/active_record/attributes/encrypted_attributes