In response to a question I posted on the Catalyst list, Tomas Doran (among other suggestions) posted a beautifully devious way to add additional capabilites to your application for test purposes.

When you’re testing with Catalyst::Test and running a local test, you don’t actually fire up a web server and talk over the wire.  It loads your program’s library in to the test script, and calls the functions with the same objects given to it by the other servers.

Your Cat app runs, but all as functions in your program.

Since this is your program – and a test script is just a funny Perl program – you can load libraries and add additional things to the namespace.

Tomas Doran pointed out the other day, in a post on the Catalyst mailing list, that you could manipulate the session data between test calls if you needed to.

My original question was about manipulating what user was logged by playing with the cookie cache, but it should apply to any value in the session.  You could check them, to see that the internal state of your program is what you think it is, or you could fiddle with them, to test that it does the right things.

I don’t know why this didn’t come to me quicker, but I got some good advice on the Catalyst mailing list.  It boils down to “look at how other people do it”, which I usually think of.

What I’d never thought of before was to look at their test cases for ways to do it.

Both Tomas Doran and Peter Karman made good suggestions of places to look for things that would help with my authentication issue.

The other day, I asked a question over on the Catalyst mailing list which spurred on some discussion.  Some of that discussion showed up with an example of how to check for cookines on the result of a Catalyst::Test operation.

There seems to be a way to jigger it in, but adding some real support for it might be better. Others seemed to agree.

How?  What’s best?

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