How to automate unit tests for Windows 8 applications for HTML5?

Question

I am writing an application for Windows 8 and writing block tests for it. How can I run them automatically in a Windows 8 environment?

If I write super-simple JavaScript files, regardless of the Windows 8 or DOM environment, I can unit test them from the command line using Node.js. It is very fast (less than one second).

If I need to enable the DOM, and I use the DOM for not too new functions, I can use jsdom in Node.js and get the same setup and at the same speed.

But jsdom is incomplete, and often I want to use basic Windows 8 features such as the WinJS core library (like WinJS.Promise ) or Windows.* enumerations Windows.* . And ideally, I should test in the same JS engine and in the DOM environment, since my application will really work.

Ideally, I need a test runner: a lightweight container for Windows 8 HTML5 that can run some unit tests with a real DOM and access to the WinJS and Windows Runtime APIs. To integrate into the build process, I also need the ability to report the results back to the command line (stdout, stderr) and change the test runner’s return code depending on success or failure. And it must be fully automated, possible in the background and very fast (less than 10 seconds).

I know that for WebKit there are tools such as, for example, PhantomJS . Is there such a situation for the Windows Runtime HTML5 environment? If not, which APIs should I look for to create something like this?

Answer 1

There is currently no way to run the Win8 / WinJS test suite in a silent way. The runtime environment required for WinJS applications cannot be installed independently without running the full WinJS application.

The best way to run tests is IME - create a separate WinJS project in your solution to run your tests.

Christopher Bennage has a blog post that describes the basic setup here: http://dev.bennage.com/blog/2012/08/15/unit-testing-winjs/

And I have a few blog posts that are moving a little along the way:

http://lostechies.com/derickbailey/category/winjs/

http://lostechies.com/derickbailey/2012/08/17/asynchronous-unit-tests-with-mocha-promises-and-winjs/

http://lostechies.com/derickbailey/2012/08/21/a-winjs-specrunner-automating-script-tag-insertion-for-unit-tests/

If you do not like the idea of ​​launching a separate project for your tests, or if you want QUnit instead of Jasmine or Mocha, check out QUnit-Metro: http://qunitmetro.github.com/QUnitMetro/ - it starts in the project with your real application and provides context menu in design mode to run tests for the page on which you are located.

I am not a fan of QUnit or how QUnit-Metro works on a page. But you may find it suitable if you do not like a separate project.

Hope this helps.