Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We鈥檒l occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

assert: introducing no field is empty assertion function #1591

Open
wants to merge 1 commit into
base: master
Choose a base branch
from

Conversation

PeterEFinch
Copy link

@PeterEFinch PeterEFinch commented Apr 26, 2024

Summary

Proposal to introduce an assertion that checks that no (exported) fields are empty in a struct.

Changes

  1. A function NoFieldIsEmpty is introduced into into the assert package. This function fails the test and returns false if any of the fields in the inputed struct (or reference to struct) are empty, aligning with pre-existing definition of empty.
  2. Tests for the newly introduced NoFieldIsEmpty function were added.
  3. go generate ./... was run.

Motivation

I found myself repeatedly rewriting similar code in tests across different repositories in an effort to ensure that tests do not become out-of-date and no longer align with their original intention.

An example of this is writing tests that check that all fields in a struct can be stored and then loaded. Consider the test:

// Tests that all fields in entity can be stored and loaded
func TestPersistence(t *testing.T) {
	entity := Entity{
		// Filled with data
	}
	
	s := NewStore()
	err := s.Store(entity)
	require.NoError(t, err)
	
	result, err := s.Load(entity.ID)
	require.NoError(t, err)
	assert.Equal(t, entity, result, "result should match the entity stored")
}

This test is claiming to check that all fields can be stored and loaded but it not enforcing it. If the entity was not correctly populated initially or if new fields where added to the Entity and the test was not updated then the test would not be align with its stated purpose.

In this particular case the assertion could be used as a pre-condition to ensure we always start with all fields containing data

require.NoFieldIsEmpty(t, entity)

or as check at the end of test to ensure all fields where populated

assert.NoFieldIsEmpty(t, result)

I have found this assertion useful for when using tests that require populated structs including:

  1. Testing the storing and loading of structs into database or persistence storage.
  2. Testing the population of structs e.g. writing fakers.
  3. Testing the marshalling/formatting of structs and unmarshalling/parsing data to structs.

Related issues

None.

Additional comments

  1. This form of assertion does not appear to be wide spread from what I have seen and thus maybe is of low impact - however, maybe that is just due to a dislike of reflection 馃槄.
  2. Although I find such an assertion useful there are times when I want all bar some fields populated and it might be better to have a function with the signature
func NoFieldIsEmpty(t TestingT, object interface{}, exclude []string, msgAndArgs ...interface{}) bool
  1. This assertion doesn't solve the issue of nested structs are populated too (although it does help). I avoided approaching addressing this because it was unclear of how to express nested field names and handle arrays of structs. Also, having some feedback on the the simple case seemed to be a good starting point.
  2. Thank you for reading & reviewing 馃槃

@PeterEFinch PeterEFinch marked this pull request as ready for review April 26, 2024 09:37
@PeterEFinch
Copy link
Author

PeterEFinch commented Apr 26, 2024

Please let me know if I should also create an issue alongside this PR as it is for proposed functionality.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
None yet
Projects
None yet
Development

Successfully merging this pull request may close these issues.

None yet

1 participant