Passing reference from Global Setup

[sporto]

In my global setup I get a reference to a db session.

func TestBooks(t *testing.T) {
    RegisterFailHandler(Fail)

    //Code to set up your infrastructure
    dbSession := ...

    RunSpecs(t, "Books Suite")
}

Then I my test I will like to use this reference.

It("does something", func() {
    foo, err := service.Run(dbSession)
    ...
})

How can I do this?

Maybe Ginkgo needs a beforeAll block to do this?

[onsi]

I ran into this myself and also thought "does Ginkgo need a beforeAll block"? Then I realized:

func TestBooks(t *testing.T) {
    RegisterFailHandler(Fail)

    //BEFORE ALL
    RunSpecs(t, "Books Suite")
    //AFTER ALL
}

Here's how I share global state:

var dbSession *DBSession

func TestBooks(t *testing.T) {
    RegisterFailHandler(Fail)

    dbSession = DBSession.New(...)
    err := dbSession.Connect()
    Ω(err).ShouldNot(HaveOccured())
    RunSpecs(t, "Books Suite")
    dbSession.Disconnect()
}

Now your Its have access to the global dbSession and, because Ginkgo will only call your Befores and Its during RunSpecs you can trust that the dbSession is initialized.

There's one more trick here. If you want to reset the DB between each test you can do this in your bootstrap file:

var dbSession *DBSession

func TestBooks(t *testing.T) {
    RegisterFailHandler(Fail)

    dbSession = DBSession.New(...)
    err := dbSession.Connect()
    Ω(err).ShouldNot(HaveOccured())
    RunSpecs(t, "Books Suite")
    dbSession.Disconnect()
}

var _ = BeforeEach(func() {
    err := dbSession.Reset()
    Ω(err).ShouldNot(HaveOccured())
})

This is a top-level BeforeEach that will run before every test.

One last pattern: when I have a lot of infrastructure for a test suite (e.g. an integration test suite that manages multiple external processes) I wrap all that stuff into a separate mothership/provider object and initialize/reset that object in the boostrap but then pull things off of that object throughout my various tests. This keeps the bootstrap file small and centralizes all the infrastructure management to a separate object/package (which can now be shared among tests).

[onsi]

oops.. didn't mean to close the issue -- i'll let you do that @sporto if you think the approach I outlined above is sufficient.

[sporto]

Cool this works, thanks.

There is a subtle mistake I ran into and I thought this was not working (just writing it here for future reference):

var dbSession *DBSession

func TestBooks(t *testing.T) {
        RegisterFailHandler(Fail)

    dbSession, err := DBSession.New(...)
    if err != nil {
        ...
    }
    RunSpecs(t, "Books Suite")
}

In this case I shadowed the variable dbSession without thinking about it because I needed to get err in the same line, so then dbSession was nil in my tests.

[onsi]

Yep... I think I run into this one three times a day ;)

Sent from my iPad

On Nov 22, 2013, at 5:52 PM, Sebastian Porto notifications@github.com wrote:

Cool this works, thanks.

There is a subtle mistake I ran into and I thought this was not working (just writing it here for future reference):

var dbSession *DBSession

func TestBooks(t *testing.T) {
RegisterFailHandler(Fail)

dbSession, err := DBSession.New(...)
if err != nil {
    ...
}
RunSpecs(t, "Books Suite")

}
In this case I shadowed the variable dbSession without thinking about it because I needed to get err in the same line, so then dbSession was nil in my tests.

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Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

[tzvatot]

I would really like to have beforeAll() that will run once before all the It it cover.
The reason is that you sometime group together several specs and they all can share a common state, but I don't want that state to be global to the suite: it's not serving all the specs.

[williammartin]

Please add your thoughts to #70 @tzvatot.