The testing environment
- Patricia Ryser-Welch (Unlicensed)
Rationale
Code executed in R requires an environment, that manages the variables and R object used during execution. The latter is a data structure that provides the R programmer the ability to scope. Scoping makes available some variables visible from one element to another.
Test_that uses its own environment, that differs from the .GlobalEnv environment. The latter is used by default, when some R scripts and notebooks are interpreted and executed by R. By initialising, managing and clearing a new environment, then the DataSHIELD testing framework can provide all the tools and support every developer to write some tests. Also, any connections to an Opal server can be managed from the start to the end of some execution of tests.
ds.test_env environment
During its initialisation process, DataSHIELD testing framework creates the ds.test_env environment. The latter is destroyed once all the test have been executed. The ds.test_env environment defines the variables listed and described below. Each of them must be referred as ds.test_env$[name.variable].
Connection information
These variables are defined and initialised in the file /test/testthat/connection_to_datasets/login_details.R. These variables are either initialised by the functions named with init at the start (see Connecting to the Testing dataset ) or in the /test/testthat/connection_to_datasets/login_details.R file.
Name of variables | Data Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
ds.test_env$contexts | Vector of character | provides the values for the contexts of the tests; that is
|
ds.test_env$context | Character | The current context of the test completed. |
ds.test_env$package | Character | The name of the package that needs to be tested. |
ds.test_env$ip_address_1 ds.test_env$ip_address_2 ds.test_env$ip_address_3 | Character | holds the ip addresses to connect to the opal servers, used in the testing. These IP addresses are expressed as urls, to connect with Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS). The corresponding port, i.e., 8443 is added to match the standard. Example https://192.168.56.100:8443 |
ds.test_env$ping_address | Character | This variable is used to verify an opal server is available with a specified IP address. A function provided by the RCurl library can test the reachability of the opal servers. To achieve this purpose the Hypertext Transfer Protocol is used, with the port. So, the variable stores this value: http://192.168.56.100:8080 |
ds.test_env$user_1 ds.test_env$user_2 ds.test_env$user_3 | Character | These three variables represent the user name used to connect the opal servers |
ds.test_env$password_1 ds.test_env$password_2 ds.test_env$password_3 | Character | These three variables hold the password corresponding to each user name. The combination of the users variables and the password allows to connect to the opal servers provided by the virtual machine. |
ds.test_env$server | Vector of character | holds the name of the server(s) used in one test. The minimum length is one. |
ds.test_env$url | Vector of character | contains the url(s) used to connect to the server. The latter use one of the ip_addresses (see above) variables or all of them. |
ds.test_env$user | Vector of character | contains the user name(s) used to connect to one or several servers. The latter use one of the user (see above) variables or all of them. |
ds.test_env$password | Vector of character | contains the password(s) required to login to one of more servers. The latter uses one of the password variable or all of them. |
Testing data set
The testing dataset is described in this page Dataset for testing. These variables are set and initialised
These variables are either initialised by the functions named with init at the start (see Connecting to the Testing dataset ) or in the /test/testthat/connection_to_datasets/login_details.R file.
Name of variables | Data Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
ds.test_env$tolerance | Numerical | Sets the tolerance for accuracy in each test. It is currently set to 10-6 |
ds.test_env$table | Vector of character | holds the name of the tables stored on the opal server on the virtual machine. These tables are referred as:
|
ds.test_env$login.data | Data frame | holds a server login data frame in a suitable format. The datashield.build.login.data.frame.o function guarantees the format and content is appropriate. |
ds.test_env$stats.var | Vector of character | holds the list of column defined in TESTING data set. More information about these columns can be found in this page: Dataset for testing |
ds.test_env$local.values.1 ds.test_env$local.values.2 ds.test_env$local.values.3 | Data frame | Each of these data frames contains the same data as the data provided on the server. These data frames aims at computing some results locally. Then, these results can be compared with the some results obtained from a DataSHIELD function. These three data sets a method to verify the expected values. |
ds.test_env$local.values | Data frame | When the three datasets used, this variable combines ds.test_env$local.values.1, ds.test_env$local.values.2 and ds.test_env$local.values.3. This variable can therefore be used to write some tests that combines the values from the three servers. |
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