I'm continuing to build a testing infrastructure for Cartwheel. One thing to test is the XML-RPC API for controlling the server remotely; this lets users upload sequences, create analyses, and download results programmatically.

Now, doing functional testing of an XML-RPC server is just as annoying as testing any Web app: you have to run the Web server, bind the port, etc. Wouldn't it be great if I could just test the application directly without all that trouble!?

Luckily for me, I have a passing familiarity with wsgi_intercept, a tool that lets you bypass the external network by routing HTTP calls directly to a WSGI application. And, as it turns out, XML-RPC works via HTTP! So I can test my XML-RPC API without touching the network.

Here's the code:

wsgi_app = MyWSGI_ApplicationObject()

class _InprocessHTTP(httplib.HTTP):
    _connection_class = wsgi_intercept.WSGI_HTTPConnection

class _InprocessTransport(xmlrpclib.Transport):
    def make_connection(self, host):
        host, extra_headers, x509 = self.get_host_info(host)
        return _InprocessHTTP(host)

wsgi_intercept.add_wsgi_intercept('localhost', 80, lambda : wsgi_app)

# this is the "money line of code"
server = xlmrpclib.Server(server_url, transport=_InprocessTransport())

So, all calls to 'server', e.g. 'server.remote_function()', will work through an in-process call directly to 'wsgi_app'. Nifty!

The great thing about this is that for a minimal expenditure of code -- basically, the above -- you are actually testing every part of the XML-RPC connection without going through the hassle of running the actual server. So you can catch errors in any part of your stack with this technique.

--titus

Legacy Comments

Posted by Grig on 2006-11-22 at 20:30.

Niiiiiiice!