Question

I am writing an automated test suit for a program that has mailing lists. I am trying to decide on the best practice for structuring the tools that I am going to use. The tests need to send email to a variety of email addresses then use the application to perform an action (approve, reject, discard). Then the script finally needs to check its mail and compare the email it has received against the list of emails it expects to receive. Here is the list of tools I am using.

Ruby,
Rake,
Selenium Webdriver,
Test-unit,
Jenkins

What I wanted to do was to treat everything as a dependency (in rake) of the last step(checking the email). My problem came when tried to make every email unique. I plan to embed the time the test was run at and a number assigned to each email in the test into the email (this number will be the same for each run of the test so I can identify where it should go). I need a way to pass the time stamp from the beginning of the test to the end of the test.

The solutions I see to my problems are to get rid of rake (because I can’t or don’t know how to pass a variable between tasks) or to write to a file then access the file in the seperate tasks.

Any recommendations?

Answer 1

I would advise setting an ENV variable in your Rakefile before each test is run, like this:

ENV['TIMESTAMP_CONTROL'] = Time.now.to_s

You can then reference the variable anywhere in your scripts and Rakefile until you reset it again like any other Ruby variable:

assert_equal ENV['TIMESTAMP_CONTROL'], @email_response_text