First MIFOS unit tests pass with Mayfly

(This was actually from 2 Nov 2006)

So, one of my main projects lately (last 2 months or so) has been getting the MIFOS unit tests to work with an in-memory database. For a while the task was just to get Mayfly to read the MIFOS SQL files (mifosdbcreationscript.sql and mifosmasterdata.sql) - I could measure progress by how many lines into the script before Mayfly gave an error.

After that, the task was to get Hibernate to talk to Mayfly. This was considered successful when a simple Hibernate call could get an object from data which had been in the database (I later found out that there were other corners of Hibernate I needed to worry about).

Then there was running a MIFOS test (one of the existing unit tests, which have been running with MySQL until now). I started with FeePersistenceTest (chosen more or less at random).

First step was making it through the initialization code in TestCaseInitializer. This mostly just worked, but there was one interesting surprise. There was a join of 80 rows by 500 rows by 500 rows (written with implicit joins and WHERE, not INNER JOIN and ON), and that was too much for the naive "build the cartesian product first and then start applying WHERE conditions" algorithm that Mayfly had. Now, one can argue that a unit test should be whittling down its dataset, and that might be how we end up going, but one of my ideas for MIFOS and Mayfly is to see how far we can get while avoiding some of those familiar unit testing slimmings. (As another example, if I run into a piece of MySQL-specific SQL, I tend to rewrite the SQL to be portable, or add the feature to Mayfly, rather than build an abstraction layer which lets MIFOS generate different flavours of SQL). Anyway, back to joins. I built a simple query optimizer which got me past this.

Oh, yeah, and there was all the ALTER TABLE work I did so Mayfly could execute some/all of the Iteration*.sql files (as it turns out, I'm not sure I needed this quite yet, but I should soon).

So next various things failed as FeePersistenceTest created its test objects and such. I've been fixing those one at a time. In fact, I've
been beginning to worry about how much work might be left, given that I don't have any particularly good way to estimate how many of these features remain. Well, this morning I saw an odd symptom - instead of the usual 6 failing tests, I only saw 4. That's right, 2 had passed. Looking at what had failed, I saw 2 easy features to implement on
my laptop at lunch, and once I checked that in, all 6 were passing!

Now, when I tried running CenterBOTest (second test picked at random), there were a whole new set of failures. But still, to be over the FeePersistenceTest hump is quite exciting.