[TIP] Using one unit test with different input parameters

[Robert McHardy]

On 19 Feb 2008, at 22:18, Ben Finney wrote:

> Robert McHardy <robert at mchardy.net> writes:
>
>> The client has 28 sites that are very similar.  I'd rather not have
>> to clone the test script 28 times with different hard-coded domain
>> details...  but I can't figure out how to pass in different
>> parameters to the unit test - e.g. a different DOMAIN dict with data
>> for other sites, and have the tests run on that domain instead.
>
> I often use the test fixtures to store a container of test parameter
> sets, then iterate over those parameter sets inside the test cases::
>
>         # ... etc ...
>
> In the test case given above, the 'sites' dict could simply be a
> module global instead, since it's not necessary to create it each
> time. If it contains anything that needs to be set up for each test
> case, keep it in the fixtures.
>
>> Any tips or hints gratefully received!
>
> You're using unittest.TestCase, but not using any of the
> 'failUnlessFoo' methods; that means the unittest reports won't be very
> informative about what fails.
>

Thanks to all for the hints - I'm going to try both extending the  
unit tests with iteration over multiple sites (might be easiest), and  
also Terry's suggestion of test generators in nose.

Cheers, Rob.