The Disco Blog

Quality Labs just released PDbSeed, a Python framework for seeding a database. This is quite a hip tool during developer testing of applications which require a database. If you’ve ever heard of DbUnit, this is its Python cousin, man.

For example, here is a rough example of a PyUnit test case which refreshes the database on setup with a known dataset and then asserts the existence of a specific column value to verify the data was properly inserted.

import unittest
import pdbseed.core.dbseed as dbseed

class database_testcase(unittest.TestCase):

   def setUp(self):
     """
      setUp updates the database with the data found
      in the dataset
     """
     dbseed.RefreshOperation().execute(self._dataSet())

   def testData(self):
     """
      test case creates a new connection to db and
      asserts a specific item from the xml file exists
     """
     import MySQLdb
     conn= MySQLdb.connect( host = "localhost", \
        user = "words", passwd = "words", db = "words")

     query = 'select word.part_of_speech from word \
        where word.spelling = \'pugnacious\';'

     curs = conn.cursor()
     curs.execute(query)

     wlist = curs.fetchall()

     for word in wlist:
	  self.assertEqual('Adjective', word[0], 'Adj was not returned')

     conn.close()

   def _dataSet(self):
    """
      method returns a dbseed dataset type.
    """
    dbhost = 'localhost'
    dbname = 'words'
    dbuser = 'words'
    dbpassword = 'words'
    datasetFilename = 'C:/dev/prdbtesting/conf/words-seed.xml'
    metaDataFilename = 'C:/dev/prdbtesting/conf/metadata.xml'

    context = dbseed.ContextFactory.createContext('mysql', metaDataFilename, \
       dbhost, dbname, dbuser, dbpassword)

    return dbseed.FlatXMLFileRecordProducer(context, datasetFilename)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    unittest.main()

This example reads two files. One is metadata file which describes a database schema and the other is a dataset which contains values to be inserted into the database.

For more information, see the PDbSeed documentation; additionally, the library bundles some example code. Dig it?

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