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You can decide the level of detail that you want to go to, from overall,
end-to-end testing to individual functions and templates.  For functions
and templates,  you'll probably need to write test XSLT stylesheets that
include the modules containing the details that interest you so that they
are exposed to a test transformation.

Best of luck
 On May 29, 2014 9:11 AM, "BR Chrisman brchrisman@xxxxxxxxx" <
xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Wed, May 28, 2014 at 10:38 PM, Ihe Onwuka ihe.onwuka@xxxxxxxxx <
> xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, May 28, 2014 at 8:38 PM, Ihe Onwuka <ihe.onwuka@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> On Wed, May 28, 2014 at 7:57 PM, Vasudev Kandhadai
>>> vasu.kandhadai@xxxxxxxxx <xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:
>>>
>>>> Dear All,
>>>> is there a good reason to deploy a XSLT unit testing framework?
>>>>
>>>
>>> No.
>>>
>>>
>>>> I have never seen any serious XSLT dev env where the XSLT unit testing
>>>> was either done religiously, or considered mandatory.  Other than a very
>>>> religious Java development team with strict Junit set up with Maven etc,
>>>> who have adopted XSLT into their dev env, who would now want to extend the
>>>> same ideologies to the XSLT world?  I have personally never used or
>>>> utilized practically any XSLT unit testing framework in any project and nor
>>>> was there any requirement to do so...
>>>>
>>>>
>>> Why is Java a valid reference point. It's a completely different
>>> language.
>>>
>>>
>> Right. This merits amplification. The phrase "Unit Test Frameworks"  has
>> acquired in my view a specific connotation related to ideas from Test
>> Driven Development. They are a creature that evolved from the procedural
>> programming community to solve problems that arise during the development
>> of procedural programs.
>>
>> XSLT done right is declarative. The programmer does not have the same
>> level of control over what processing (and therefore what tests) gets done
>> when. So before adopting a methodology founded on "Unit testing frameworks"
>> the first question I would ask is - in XSLT what should constitute a unit -
>> or to put it more finely what is the smallest component that should be the
>> subject of a discrete testing effort.
>>
>> Is it a stylesheet. I don't think so, at least not if you are coding
>> declaratively. How would I think about it. Well what is more useful on a
>> bug report - that there is a bug on stylesheet X, or that  executing tests
>> targeted at template Y in stylesheet X exposed a bug.  So I would say the
>> focus on testing an XSLT program should be at the template rule level and
>> if I were to adopt any sort of test driven methodology it might evolve
>> around the concept of the template rule as a unit (with all that entails).
>>  That however is  a big if.
>>
>
> If everything needed to test a particular template could be assembled, and
> the template's name is passed in as initial template... then there's
> mocking calls like the various input/output doc stuff... and parameters to
> the template...  But it sounds like a lot of the tools out there do this
> already, like: "show me only the nodes resulting from this template".
>
> I can see how that might be useful... all my xslt projects have been
> implemented as series of small stylesheets applied in a layering/pipeline,
> so I'd generally achieve mostly the same thing by isolating a template (or
> a few templates) in a particular layer/stage and using a 'tee' type
> utility... (works for identity-based transforms).
>
> I'm thinking for my next such project, having a stylesheet transform the
> source stylesheet, adding a debug namespace and instructions to add debug
> namespace elements to the result nodes of specific templates, so I can
> track the output of those without having to isolate.
>
>
>
>>  If someone were to sit down and design from scratch a testing
>> methodology acclimated to XSLT in particular and declarative programming in
>> general it would not look like nUnit. The efficacy of these testing
>> methodologies is oversold. Similar benefits would accrue to any effort that
>> entailed the automation of test execution. What nUnit has done is increase
>> the number of programmers that are willing to be involved in testing by
>> turning it into a programming activity and that has a knock on beneficial
>> effect especially in the paradigm from which these methods evolved.
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