NAME

Test::Class::WithStrictPlan - Test::Class with exact and strict plan

SYNOPSIS

package Example::Test;
use parent 'Test::Class::WithStrictPlan';

use Test::More;

sub test1 : Test(2) {
  is(10 + 20, 30, 'addition works');
  is(20 + 10, 30, 'both ways');
}

__PACKAGE__->runtests;

DESCRIPTION

Test::Class::WithStrictPlan is an extension of the Test::Class module. It has exactly the same API, methods and behavior with just one difference in what the plan number specified in Test attribute means. In Test::Class it means the maximal number of tests for a correspondent method; in Test::Class::WithStrictPlan it means strictly the exact number of tests (not more, not less).

The following example demonstrates the difference the best: it uses Test::Class but contains an incorrect pattern in the test code.

package Example1;
use parent 'Test::Class';

use Test::More;

sub test1 : Test(3) {
  is(1 + 1, 2);
  is(2 + 2, 4);
}

__PACKAGE__->runtests;

The plan specifies 3 tests, but only 2 are defined. When this test is run it passes without any error.

1..3
ok 1 - test1
ok 2 - test1
ok 3 # skip 1

Why? Because the plan means the maximal number of tests which can be run and the number of tests which were run is not more than 3.

Are you interested in what the 1 means after the # skip output string? It is the return value of the test1 method. When a lower number of tests is run than specified in Test::Class then the return value of the test method is used as the reason to skip the remaining tests. In this case the value of the last statement is returned (the return value of the is call). To provide no skip reason it is needed to return undef from the test method.

In most cases one wants to specify the exact number of tests instead of the maximal number. It also prevents problems like the one in the above incorrect example. And for this purposes there is the Test::Class::WithStrictPlan module in which a plan means the exact number of specified tests.

See the above module rewritten to use Test::Class::WithStrictPlan.

package Example2;
use parent 'Test::Class::WithStrictPlan';

use Test::More;

sub test1 : Test(3) {
  is(1 + 1, 2);
  is(2 + 2, 4);
}

__PACKAGE__->runtests;

When this is run then it fails and shows an error as one would expect.

1..3
ok 1 - test1
ok 2 - test1
not ok 3 - (Example2::test1 returned before plan complete)
#   Failed test '(Example2::test1 returned before plan complete)'
#   at ??/Test/Class.pm line ??.
#   (in Example2->test1)
# Looks like you failed 1 test of 3.

Basically this module is just a syntactic sugar for returning early from Test::Class.

SEE ALSO

Test::Class

AUTHOR

Pali <pali@cpan.org>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright (C) 2017 by Pali <pali@cpan.org>

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself, either Perl version 5.6.0 or, at your option, any later version of Perl 5 you may have available.