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Functional Testing Readme

    The functional testing support of ZopeTestCase was inspired by
    Marius Gedminas' work for Zope 3.

    Deriving from the 'Functional' mix-in (and an xTestCase) adds a
    'publish' method to your test case class. Tests can call
    'self.publish(path, basic=None, env=None, extra=None, request_method='GET')', 
    passing a path and, optionally, basic-auth info and form data. 
    The path may contain a query string.

    'publish' returns an enhanced Response object, that can be queried
    for status, response body, headers, etc.

    'publish' invokes the ZPublisher machinery just as if the request 
    had come in through ZServer. This allows for high-level testing
    of things like argument marshalling, form validation, and traversal.

    Note that the tests have *full access to the ZODB*. This means you
    can easily prepare a fixture for 'publish' and/or check the impact
    of a publication on the database. This represents a major advantage 
    over purely URL-based test environments!

    Please see the 'testFunctional.py' example test for more.

    While the modules are called 'functional.py' in both Zope 3 and 
    ZopeTestCase, it is current wisdom that such tests are not truly
    "functional tests", but rather "integration tests".

    True functional tests, in their most-helpful guise as "acceptance
    tests", must be able to test the end-user experience. For web 
    applications this means: browser simulation.

    Plone 2 comes with an 'ftests' package combining the functional
    testing support of ZopeTestCase with the "mechanize" browser 
    simulator library: http://wwwsearch.sourceforge.net/mechanize/
    (For some version of 2, currently only available from the Plone
    CVS HEAD.)

Read the Source

    Amen. Read 'functional.py' and 'sandbox.py' if you want to know
    what's going on behind the scenes.


