Overview

A simple means of testing a text transformation is to provide "before" and "after" files, run the transformation on the "before" file, and check that the result matches the "after" file. (The "after" file is commonly referred to as the "golden" file.) For our import.xsl and export.xsl stylesheets, we can provide a file in the external format, and an equivalent file in s3xml. Then running import.xsl on the external file should produce the matching s3xml file, and vice versa for export.xsl -- each can serve as the golden file for the other.

To simplify testing xsl stylesheets, and thus encourage people to provide tests, we can supply a test helper that can be called from our regular test process, and to which the user supplies just pointers to the stylesheets and their before and after files.

Specifics

The test helper can run as a Python unit test, under control of eden/modules/unit_tests/suite.py. In case people would like to add tests for other code under eden/static, we can follow the eden/static directory structure. That is, tests for stylesheets could be placed in eden/modules/unit_tests/static/formats so that, for instance, if people later want to write tests for tools, those could be placed in eden/modules/unit_tests/static/scripts/tools.