Recommended structure for testing Javascript with

Question

I have a standard ASP.NET MVC (version 2 preview 2) solution with the actual project and server-side unit tests in separate projects.

Because this project is very client-side heavy, I want to make a ClientTest project as well that uses QUnit to test the main project.

I've thought of creating a regular ASP.NET webforms project with a single HTML file that would load the various scripts in my Scripts/ directory and test them with QUnit. Unfortunately this will spawn another ASP.NET Development Server. I could configure the port of the running MVC project server before running the tests, but there's got to be a better way that isn't just throwing the test html file into the main MVC project.

Does anyone know of a better way of going about this?

Answer 1

It's not too clear to me why using MVC makes a difference - if you want to integrate your tests into a CI build then gWiz's suggestion is the route to go.

If your requirement is that you want to run your tests interactively directly on the real page without affecting the look of that page then you could check out the FireUnit plugin for Firebug. You can also wrap FireUnit around QUnit as described on John Resig's blog.

If you're concerned about including test stuff then include the relevant scripts in your test/debug builds and disable/remove them in your production builds.

Answer 2

Perhaps you could pick and choose techniques from this article, including using the command-line, harnessing NUnit with WatiN, and scraping test results for reporting. This solution wouldn't require a separate WebForms project to harness the tests in, since it's all handled by WatiN.

Answer 3

I like your idea of placing the QUnit tests in a separate project. What about using XCOPY to copy the scripts in the pre-build event?

Say your MVC project is MyProj.Web and your QUnit test project is MyProj.ClientTest (replace with your project names).

• Create a Scripts folder in your ClientTest project.

• From Project > MyProj.ClientTest Properties > Build Events, add the following to Pre-build event command line:

  XCOPY "$(SolutionDir)MyProj.Web\Scripts" "$(ProjectDir)Scripts" /S /Y

• Then in your HTML just include the appropriate JavaScript files from the Scripts folder.

Note: You will have to rebuild your ClientTest project to refresh JavaScript files when you want to rerun tests. Adjust folder names, paths and XCOPY options as needed.