Re: chunked output

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Micah Martin" <[email protected]>
To: "'FIT Developers'" <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, August 18, 2003 5:56 PM
Subject: [Fit-dev] chunked output


> It can take a long time to run some tests.
>
> I worked with one team that used FitNesse to test thier web app.  Simple
> tests ran in 10 secs but some of the longer ones took up to 2 minutes.  To
> run a suite of tests...whew... come back after lunch!
>
> The problem with these tests is that you don't get any feedback until
> execution has completely finished.  You click the button and you have no
> idea what is going on until you get ALL the results.  It would be really
> nice if you could see each table turn green or red as soon as it was
> processed.  The entire test might take a few minutes to finish but you
would
> see progress as it was made.
>
> By using chunked encoding I can make FitNesse do this.  But it means that
> FIT will need to spit out the results as soon as it makes them.  FIT needs
> chunked output.
>
> Now for the purpose of web pages it doesn't make sense to output anything
> less than table.  Browsers cannot format a table untill they have the
ending
> </table> tag.  So if FIT could output a table at a time, that would make
me
> happy.
>
> Please consider this feature for 1.0
>
> Micah

Something on this has been wandering through the back of my mind
ever since I started working on FitFilter. The key notion here is that
FitFilter processes one document at a time, so it's ideal for what you
want. All you have to do is implement Suite processing completely on
your side rather than on the FIT side. Then you bypass having either
the input or results on disk.

I can see two difficulties. One is getting the summary results back,
and the other is tests that actually need more than one document to
be on disk at one time.

Now, that's not exactly what you were asking for, though. On that,
I don't see a huge amount of difficulty in creating the output at the
end of each pass through table() in Fixture. What I do see a problem
with there is performance. For the more normal usage of FIT by
itself, it would involve writing the output to disk multiple times.

John Roth
>