Question

I am building a testing framework for my current development team. One thing that I’d like to let them do is create a Powershell script to run their tests. The system is a database deploy system, so to test it they will need to potentially run some set-up code, then the deploy will be kicked off, then they will run some check code at the end.

Since the deploy takes awhile I’d like to have the framework handle that once for all of the tests. So, the basic flow is:

Run test #1 set-up
Run test #2 set-up
Run test #3 set-up
Run the deploy process
Run the code to confirm that test #1 passed
Run the code to confirm that test #2 passed
Run the code to confirm that test #3 passed

I figured that I would have the framework always call a function called “setup” (or something similar) in all of the Powershell scripts in a particular directory. If no “setup” function exists that’s ok and it shouldn’t error out. Then I would run the deploy and then run the other functions in the Powershell scripts.

Given a directory listing, how could I cycle through each Powershell script and run these functions?

Thanks for any guidance!

Answer 1

Thanks to Matt’s ideas I was able to come across Invoke-Expression. Ideally I would have liked to use Invoke-Command with the -filepath parameter, which supposedly defaults to running locally. However, there is a bug that requires using the -ComputerName parameter even when running locally. If you use that parameter then it requires remoting to be turned on, even when running on the local computer.

Here’s the code that I used in my script:

# Run the setup functions from all of the Powershell test scripts
foreach ($testPSScript in Get-ChildItem "$testScriptDir\*.ps1") {
    Invoke-Expression "$testPSScript -Setup"
}

# Do some other stuff

# Run the tests in the Powershell test scripts
foreach ($testPSScript in Get-ChildItem "$testScriptDir\*.ps1") {
    Invoke-Expression "$testPSScript"
}

My test script then looked like this:

param([switch]$Setup = $false)

if ($Setup) {write-host "Setting things up"; return}

Write-Host "Running the tests"