Today I will write a short post about JavaScript and
unit testing. I heard a lot of .NET developers that they didn’t wrote code for
JavaScript because is not supported by Visual Studio, is complicated to run it
on the build machine or they don’t have time.
Guys, I have news for you, Visual Studio 2012 supports unit
tests for JavaScript, even Visual Studio 2010. You can run them almost like a
normal unit test for C# without needing to install anything. The JavaScript
unit tests are so smart that are integrated in a way that you don’t need to
change/install anything on your build machine – you even receive the standard
message notification when a unit test fail. You don’t have time for them – I will
not comment this, definition of DONE is wrong for those developers.
When I need to write unit tests for JavaScript code I usually
prefer qunit. Why? Because in combination with a small NuGet package called
NQunit you can make magic.
qunit give you the possibility to write and run JavaScript unit
tests. This is a simple testing framework. The output of running unit tests is
a XML that can be parsed, used by build machine or any other machine. More
about qunit:
NQunit makes the integration between classic unit tests for
C# and JavaScript code. Using this package you will have the possibility to run
unit tests written in JavaScript like normal unit tests. I prefer it because you
can use it with success in Visual Studio 2010 also, not only in Visual Studio
2012. One nice feature of this package is the way is integrated with the build
machine. Because this package runs normal unit tests you don’t have to change
anything on the build machine or to install something on developers’ machine.
The secret of NQunit is the way how it run the tests. He
takes from the output folder of the HTML files that were added and run them in a
browser. For each of them, he capture the XML that is generated after the test
run. The XML that is generated by qunit contains the summary of the test result
and can be used to get all the information that are needed. At the end, NQunit
will close the browser.
public static IEnumerable<QUnitTest> GetTests(params
string[] filesToTest)
Using this method you can specific all the files you want to test.
Don’t worry, when you will start to use NQunit you will see that there is a
great sample on NQUnit that is preconfigured.
Hints before you start:
Don’t run the tests from ReSharper,
ReSharper don’t run the tests as you expect – because the way how each session
of tests runs and access the rest of the output build.
If more
then one unit test from JavaScript fails, you will only receive information
related to that only one unit-tests – this can be fixed writing some C# code, but I
can live with it.
If you
have JavaScript code then write some Unit Tests.
I started to use this NuGet package one year ago and it
works great. For more information about this great package:
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