mxUnit Testing with Hudson CI Server @ CFUG Minneapolis

I'll be speaking Wednesday Nov 3, 2010 @ the ColdFusion User Group in St. Paul/Minneapolis on mxUnit Testing with Hudson Continuous Integration Server.

I'll be talking about basic Assertions, as well as going into some advanced mocking topics with the new 2.x release of the mxUnit Framework.
The second part of the evening we'll look at the Hudson Server to help execute our Unit Tests and provide jUnit reports that show execution trends as well as some special surprises.

See you there!

JDBC Connection String and Unicode

So we have a SQL Server 2005 JDBC Driver in production using the type 4 driver from Microsoft (Not the DataDirect Driver that ships with ColdFusion 8 Enterprise) and have it configured using the JDBC URL to specify the Host and some other parameters.  You do this by going into your ColdFusion Administrator and under Data & Services - Data Sources - Entering in a new connection specifying a Name and choosing 'Other' as the Driver:
Format: 


jdbc:sqlserver://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxxx;databaseName=MyDatabase;applicationName=Myclient;responseBuffering=adaptive;loginTimeout=5;lockTimeout=60000

Now the problem was that we had some other 'Connection String' information under the 'Advanced Settings' for this connection that we had configured to turn Unicode characters OFF for this dsn (thus using asii characters and varchar vs. unicode and nvarchar).  This was for performance as we had varchar fields on columns, and when we use cfquery param, and cf_sql_varchar, the dsn connection setting drives whether you are sending 'varchar(8000)' (non-unicode) or a' nvarchar(4000)' parameter to the database.


Database Indexes: If your index has to convert this nvarchar type to a varchar type of the column, then it will more than likely skip using the index all together and you loose the benefit of having an index on that column in your database (i.e. an email address field).


With Profiling ON we were able to watch the requests come through by manipulating the jdbc URL connection string as follows:
sendStringParametersAsUnicode=false will send the cfquery param data through as a varchar(8000) field
sendStringParametersAsUnicode =true (which is the default) will send it through as a nvarchar(4000) field




What we noticed is that those types of queries with:
<cfqueryparam value="#arguments.email#" cfsqltype="cf_sql_varchar">
would not use the index.


Another thing we noticed was that we had specified sendStringParametersAsUnicode=false in the 'Connection String' area under Advanced Settings.  This was NOT being taken into effect when sending parameterized queries to the db.  We HAD to move this string into the JDBC URL portion in order for it to work.  Bug in ColdFusion?? We're not sure, but we hope this helps someone out there.


This is how the dsn should look:

Executing Remote MXUnit Tests in CFBuilder/CFEclipse

I had some interesting problems the other week while working on some Model-Glue (gesture) RemoteService requests. I had posted to the Model-Glue Google Group about a few things I ran into when using the AbstractRemotingService.cfc, and getting url variables to work properly through the service, which they have addressed (Thank you!).

Obviously you need to read the wiki documentation first.

When you Create your RemoteService.cfc that exists at the root of your application, which will be your remoting front controller if you will, you need to tell it where your main model-glue template file is located. (download the zip file from www.model-glue.com and find the modelglueapplicationtemplate directory for the sample RemotingService.cfc)

Once you have a simple working version up / running by calling /RemotingService.cfc?method=executeEvent&event=my.event&format=json and pass in the data you need to, then you need a good way to test it right? If you use MXUnit then you have more than likely configured your IDE to execute these tests.

Figure 1.0

ISSUE:
The thing I ran into was that I was using model-glue's event security where I could specify certain events to be 'authentication' needed etc. My remoting service was calling an event that required prior authorization (i.e. session.isLoggedin() or some other means). Now, when I executed a test for this event in mxUnit through the Eclipse plugin for mxunit, it would Fail the test and kept telling me I was unauthorized to execute this event etc, and return the source code for my login screen instead (which would be correct if I was not logged in). However in my unit Test, I was making sure to Call my AuthorizationFacade and log me in in the 'setup' method and verified that 'isLoggedIn()' returned true.

RESOLUTION:
So in my unit test I am doing a cfhttp 'post' (or now that they supported url variables better in the service a 'get' ) request to the RemoteService.cfc passing in my data. HOWEVER, I needed to also pass in the following through my cfhttp call:


<cfhttpparam ....="formfield" name="CFIDE" value="#cookie.CFIDE#">
<cfhttpparam ....="formfield" name="CFTOKEN" value="#cookie.CFTOKEN#">
<cfhttpparam ....="formfield" name="JSESSIONID" value="#session.sessionid#">

Once this was in place, the calls worked as expected, and returned proper json data.