Best practices in writing OpenACS automated tests
Special characters in Tcl. Try strings
starting with a -Bad
and
strings containing [BAD]
,
{
, \077
, and $Bad
. For user input, [BAD]
should never be evaluated,
\077
should not be turned into
a ?
and $Bad
should not be interpolated. The string
-Bad [BAD] \077 { $Bad
should
be valid user input, should pass through the system unaltered, and
if it isn't that's a bug.
Quoting issues. Put some html in plain
text fields and make sure the result is properly quoted anywhere it
shows up (I use "<b>bold</b>" usually). Look
out especially for quoting errors in the context bar and in round
trips via an edit form. For fields that disallow html tags you can
use &
to check that the
field is quoted properly. If it is not displayed as &
then the quoting for the field is
incorrect. (It's not clear whether this should be considered an
error but given that data for text fields can come from various
sources if it's text it should be properly quoted and we should
not rely on input validation to prevent XSS security holes.)
Whitespace input. Check that whitespace is
not considered valid input for a field if it does not make sense.
For example, the subject of a forum post is used to construct a
link and if it is " " it will have a link of <a href="..."> </a>
which would not be clickable if whitespace was allowed as a valid
input.
Double-click. Make sure that if you submit a form, use the back button, and submit again that the behavior is reasonable (correct behavior depends on what the form is for, but a server error is not reasonable).
Duplicate names. Make sure that if a duplicate name is entered that there is a reasonable error rather than a server error. Check for insert, move, copy, and rename.