The Wallace Line

Over the last few weeks, I've been writing some general XQuery functions for our own system and in collaboration with Dan McCreary. There are XQuery collections to which these could be contributed, notably Priscilla Warmsley's //www.xqueryfunctions.com/xq/
but some of my functions depend on the eXist function libraries, and I would also like to prove the functions work and show examples of use in unit tests.

I'm currently working on some system tools to browse the code, develop full coverage tests and help refactor the code for the FOLD application. Part of this suite is an XQuery unit test tool. As an experiment, I've combined the two and put up a simple demo on our public eXist demo server.

The function is defined in the prolog which is prepended to each test before execution. The result can be either text or a node which is compared with the expected result as strings or with deep-equal respectively.

The test scripts themselves, viewed as XML look a bit of a mess but the source shows the formatting. CDATA sections are now preserved in stored files in eXist which is convenient when round-tripping XQuery code containing XML, but is controversial since CDATA is only intended to encode XML characters on input but is not part of the infomodel.

Links

• CommonCode
• The test script for a function Dan wrote
  
• The test script for a BandMap structure

Next step is to document the test framework itself and provide the means for others to add test scripts.