I admit it, I am a unit-testing junkie. I think it all come down to my immense laziness – I will go to great length to avoid the extra work of having to manually test my programs.

Until now the options for unit-testing in Saleslogix were very limited. I did go through the effort of writing a few automated tests in VBScript but for the most part it was not really justifiable – it is hard to maintain the separation of concern essential to unit testing and usually if I go to the trouble of forcing the concepts of encapsulation and polymorphism into vbscript I end up introducing more bugs than what I catch with unit testing.

Not so with the New and Improved Saleslogix. I want to demonstrate how unit testing in the Saleslogix web client can make our work faster, easier, and help us produce better quality code through a simple problem I faced today on the Insert Opportunity screen – the “OnCreate” opportunity rule would crash with a NullReferenceException. This of course has a very selfish goal – the more people we have excited about the benefits of automated unit testing in Saleslogix, the more Sage will be inclined to make their code testable (and maybe encourage them to use automated testing themselves!)

You could troubleshoot the issue by copying the rule to your own assembly, sprinkle it with logging statements, associate it in the architect, redeploying the web site, try the form again, then try and figure out where the error is. Once you have compiled the rule into your own assembly you can actually also open it in the Visual Studio debugger which will save a lot of time but you still have to go through those build, deploy, login, and trigger steps. I don’t know about your machine but it takes me about 1 1/2 minute to do a full build and deploy, then the debugger has to compile the site to open it which also takes 2 to 3 minutes, after which it still takes 30 to 50 seconds to log into the site and get to the right page. By that time my coffee is getting cold. And if you want to make a change to the rule and try again, you have to restart from the beginning… argh!

Enter unit testing. When unit testing you will still be loading the NHibernate configuration, dynamic methods etc, but you won’t have the overhead of the web server, javascript, painting the screens, or even rendering any output – you are cutting straight to the code you need to test.

So getting back to my problem. I can prepare a tiny method in my test class containing just one line of code: EntityFactory.Create(), right click it and run the test (in this picture it is shown as a call to a builder class, but this is just a wrapper around the EntityFactory):

Of course I had set up the dynamic method to call up my assembly (same thing that you would normally do through the AA interface but since we are just testing right now it is quicker to do it directly):

This fails (of course – as expected) and gives me the traceback I needed. OK, line 145! Let’s set a breakpoint and re-run it (note that you would have the same thing if you opened the web site in the debugger – this is just a LOT faster):

Oh well, the option must not be set, let’s set it in SQL and re-run the test (if you were testing on the live system you would have to restart the web server to get it to re-read the options at this point):

That’s right, 5.14 seconds! How long does it take you to restart IIS and relog into the web client? And perhaps the best part – I can now keep the test in the collection and it will automatically catch any similar problem in the 7.2.3 upgrade.

Hope this will convince some of the power in unit testing. You will want to check this post on how to set your environment up for unit testing: Unit Testing SLX – 7.2.2 Update. If you need any help send me an email or a comment.