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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