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Timothy Leavitt · Nov 4, 2024

@Jani Hurskainen providing a top-level answer here:

If you want to truly build your own unit test framework from scratch, you'd need to create a custom resource processor class in IPM. I see from https://github.com/intersystems/ipm/issues/616 that you've already discovered this feature and I appreciate your tenacity and the deep dive into IPM that you're doing.

Every development team I've worked on within InterSystems (that is, three very different ones) has had its own things it's wanted to do that %UnitTest.Manager and %UnitTest.TestCase don't *quite* do the way we want, with the API we want, right out of the box. The approach in general is to extend %UnitTest.Manager to tweak unit test runner behaviors (IPM does this itself, as you may have noticed); to extend %UnitTest.TestCase to add application-specific utility methods, assertions, and generic On(Before|After)(All|One)Test(s?) implementations (often controlled by class parameters); and potentially to add some mix-in utility classes that one might extend along with %UnitTest.TestCase or your own derived unit test base class.

For the basic case of "I want to run tests with my own %UnitTest.Manager subclass" we have a flag you can pass in to override the unit test manager class, -DUnitTest.ManagerClass=yourclassname. See https://community.intersystems.com/post/unit-tests-and-test-coverage-int... for an example of how to use this (with my team's https://github.com/intersystems/TestCoverage open source package).

At the IPM codebase level, there's special treatment of the common "pParams" array passed around everywhere - something looking at pParams("UnitTest","ManagerClass") will find the value specified in -DUnitTest.ManagerClass in the package manager shell command.

Hopefully this is helpful!

Timothy Leavitt · Nov 4, 2024

@Evgeny Shvarov to some extent we already do, via the -DUnitTest.ManagerClass parameter we use to run TestCoverage and through custom resource processors (which I see @Jani Hurskainen is already playing with!)

The common pattern in ObjectScript if you're going to customize unit test processes is to write a subclass of %UnitTest.Manager that does things the way you want. (And probably a few subclasses of %UnitTest.TestCase that add the standard assertion types, maybe some application-specific utility methods / wrappers, etc.) IPM will play well with this model, it's more work (all around!) if you want to write your own entire unit test framework from scratch.