[xwiki-users] Recommendations on writing automated functional tests for xar extensions ?

Hello, I would like to discuss a little on writing of Selenium2 tests, as described in test strategy [1], ie use Selenium 2 and apply Page Objects pattern. My particular use-case is that I'm on a mission : write some functional tests for my mail archive application. I also think these would be the best tests for my app, as it greatly relies on 2 external interfaces (xwiki for persistence/conf, javamail and mail accounts on another side). There are some good unit tests to write of course, but the main logic of the app has more meaning to be tested in "real life", or close to that. To do that, I decided to try and plug myself in xwiki test framework, in order to avoid redeveloping everything (such as deploying / launching an xwiki instance from the tests). I added 2 modules in my project: - xwiki-contrib-mailarchive-test-pageobjects - xwiki-contrib-mailarchive-test-ui Both inherit from org.xwiki.enterprise:xwiki-enterprise-test pom, and are greatly inspired from poms of xwiki-enterprise-test-pageobjects and xwiki-enterprise-test-ui poms. It's unfinished and untested, but I believe I'll be able to have xwiki instance installed, launched, and tests run automatically. My main question, is how should I do in order to also deploy my app in this wiki instance prior to run the tests ? For now I have several possible solutions that come to my mind, but I don't know what would be the best... : A- - grab xwiki-standalone zip version x.y.z, unzip it, launch it - make EM install my application (call some REST API ? GET some page with proper parameters ?) - run the tests B- - grab xwiki-standalone zip version x.y.z, unzip it - "patch" it in some way with my application binaries, (ie, add things directly under permanent directory / extension / repository ?) - launch it and run the tests I personnally prefer A-, but it supposes also that the xwiki instance knows any of my "dev" maven repositories (either my local repository .m2, or my local instance of Nexus), so it would mean an additional step would be to "patch" the standalone wiki xwiki.properties to add my personal repo. Or maybe I can add such repo programmatically in the wiki instance from java by looking up and using the right component ? Maybe this point has already been solved by anyone, so if you have any samples it would be good enough. I did not search exhaustively, but I don't remember having seen such use-cases on existing extensions on github. Also, I think it might be interesting to extract from all this some kind of maven archetype for functional testing of UI extension ? So contributors could just call the archetype and get everything properly prepared, and just have to add page objects and tests for their app ... WDYT ? BR, Jeremie [1] http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/Testing#HSelenium2-basedFrame…