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.
Doubleclick. 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.