Question

first post here. I’m a novice programmer as you’ll see, and I’m learning to use Ruby to write automated functional tests. I generated the source below from Selenium IDE and I’ve been tinkering with it but I don’t understand why this code runs without instantiation or method calls.

require 'rubygems'
require "selenium-webdriver"
require "test/unit"

DataDir='Users/CH/src/ruby/data'

class Case1 < Test::Unit::TestCase

  def setup
    @driver = Selenium::WebDriver.for :firefox
    @driver.manage.timeouts.implicit_wait = 30
    @verification_errors = []
  end

  def teardown
    #@driver.quit
    assert_equal [], @verification_errors
  end

  def test_case1
    @root_url="http://www.google.com"
    @driver.get @root_url+"/#sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&biw=1440&bih=716&source=hp&q=Test&pbx=1&oq=Test&aq=f&aqi=g4&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=3631l4283l0l4700l4l4l0l0l0l0l272l860l0.2.2l4l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.,cf.osb&fp=10e90fa4cbd35dc9"
    @driver.find_element(:id, "lst-ib").clear
    @driver.find_element(:id, "lst-ib").send_keys "test"
  end

  def element_present?(how, what)
    @driver.find_element(how, what)
    true
  rescue Selenium::WebDriver::Error::NoSuchElementError
    false
  end

  def verify(&blk)
     yield
  rescue Test::Unit::AssertionFailedError => ex
     @verification_errors << ex
  end
end

Sorry if it’s a hopelessly n00b question but no amount of Googling has helped answer it.

Answer 1

Because test/unit (actually minitest/unit if you’re on Ruby 1.9.x) contains the code to execute the test cases that you define. You can browse around the source here and here if you like, to see how it’s done. Essentially the require 'test/unit' line will ultimately call the autorun method on Test::Unit, which knows how to run your tests.