From: nunit-developer-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:nunit-developer-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Emerson, Mark (LESA IT)
Sent: Friday, December 02, 2005
9:22 AM
To:
nunit-developer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [nunit-developer]
Suggestion for NUnit
Before making my suggestion, I want to thank you all for
such a useful time-saving and embarrassment-avoiding tool: THANK
YOU! :)
Charlie Poole spoke at the South Sound .NET Users Group
(SSDOTNET) in Olympia
last night. A question came up on generating reports and how NUnit
produces XML containing the results which can be processed various ways (e.g.,
with XSL). My suggestion is that a menu item be added to the Tools menu,
perhaps called “Generate Report of Results…” which prompts
for an XSL file, defaulting to an NUnit sub-folder. I am also suggesting
that one or two XSL files be included with the NUnit install. Those who
wish to customize their own reports with XSL can either add files to this
sub-folder or browse to where they keep theirs. Including the two samples
can give some of us XSL-challenged folks a starting point. Once an XSL
file is selected, NUnit would generate the XML, transform it with the XSL and
save the result to a (text?) file.
For samples, perhaps these two: (1) Detailed, showing
everything that the XML has available; and, (2) Summary of Failures, showing
the names of the tests resulting in a failed state.
A significant drawback on this is it being limited to XSL
for generating the reports. An alternative would be to provide the menu
item, but using plug-ins (which would be listed as sub-menu items) to allow
custom extension of the report-generation process. A simple plug-in
providing the XSL-transformation would provide the above functionality, and
provide an example of how to code a plug-in for those who wish to use some
other engine (e.g., C# or VB program, Crystal Reports, Active Reports, Excel,
etc.) This touches on one of the
questions asked at the SSDOTNET meeting – will NUnit be able to supply
data to VS2005 for access to the VS2005 reports? If someone really wants
it, perhaps they can write a report plug-in which will port the data to the
appropriate VS2005 object for report generation (assuming that there is such a
VS2005 object…) Such plug-ins would allow more creative
approaches of reporting to be available from the NUnit gui. For example,
generating charts, sending email notification, auditing unit test results, etc.
If you have questions on this, feel free to contact me at emersonm@xxxxxxxx.
Thanks,
Mark
Mark Emerson
IS Manager
Law Enforcement Support
Agency
Tacoma, WA
