How do I test a cgi script's subroutines?

hesco has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Perhaps its just the flu ravaging our household this week that has muddled my brain, but nothing occurs to me here. I'm adding some new functionality to a rather large application I wrote several years ago before I learned to write test suites and and create object methods. A few pieces of it are broken off into loadable modules, but thousands of lines of code at included in a single .cgi script.

I am doing some work on a subroutine of that cgi script and I figure this is as good a place as any for which to start writing a test suite. But how do I "use script.cgi;" and test script::method(), without first rewriting it to break that function off into a distinct module? This needs to be a quick task, not a major distraction.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

-- Hugh

if( $lal && $lol ) { $life++; }

Comment on How do I test a cgi script's subroutines?

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Re: How do I test a cgi script's subroutines? by chromatic (Archbishop) on Oct 12, 2006 at 23:52 UTC
The easiest approach is to break it into a separate module; it's really not that difficult. Alternately, if the invocation is pretty simple, you can wrap everything in `main()` and call that only if you have no caller. `main() unless caller(); sub main { my $q = CGI->new(); # .... }` [download] Then do or require the script and test it as normal.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: How do I test a cgi script's subroutines? by brian_d_foy (Abbot) on Oct 13, 2006 at 04:15 UTC
I talk about this at length in How a script becomes a module, which is workign it's way into a chapter in Mastering Perl. chromatic gives you the secret, but I show a full example of using it. If you don't like the `caller` idea, you might just break out the subroutines into their own file and load that file with `require`. You don't need to write a full module: you're just pulling in code that used to be there but is now stored in a separate file. Once in the separate file, you can easily test the individual subroutines without executing any code until you want to. Good luck :) -- brian d foy <brian@stonehenge.com> Subscribe to The Perl Review	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: How do I test a cgi script's subroutines? by spatterson (Pilgrim) on Oct 16, 2006 at 09:47 UTC
I tend to write CGI scripts in a c-ish manner, so there'll be a sub for each page-output & often some support subs, then main() comes down to an if statement on 1 parameter: `## main foo starts my $run = param("run"); if ($run eq 'sub_1') { sub_1; } elsif ($run eq 'sub_2') { sub_2; } else { start_page }` [download] Very handy for testing as I can then call each sub individually. just another cpan module author	[reply] [d/l]