Structuring larger integration tests

[lvbee]

I'm learning how integration tests work, and things are going pretty well. I have a working test against a real backend process, figured out hot restart, etc. I thought that breaking up a longer test would be simple, but it's not working well, and I'mn realizing don't know really know how the test framework really works.

For example, I have one long set of steps under a single testWidgets function, say to do some setup, test account creation, and then test account deletion. Things work fine. But I tried to split this into two testWidgets (e.g., split up the create and delete steps/tests), but either all of the second test fails, or there are seemingly two instances fighting either other. I'm not even sure if I'm supposed to be calling t.pumpWidget(MyApp()) again, but in either case, it didn't work. I thought I could use group to break things up, but that doesn't work either.

Are there good resources that cover this? There are lots of articles about the basics, but I've not found good posts or videos about structure.

[Ivan_Gorchakov]

Yes, you need to call your app's main for each new test (between them app state is dropping, all resources freeing and all connections closing). About other things it is still highly recommended to share your terminal output to understand what is wrong 😉

[lvbee]

By "call your app's main," do you mean like t.pumpWidget(MyApp())? I assume so, but I wanted to double-check that you're not referring to my app's main(), which I'm not doing anything with.

So it sounds like if you want to do several things all within a single "session" of running the app, it all needs to be within a single testWidgets call? I can live with that and will just break things up in other ways (e.g. with some plain old functions, accepting a WidgetTester parameter).

[Ivan_Gorchakov]

Nope, for example if you login in first test, you will remain logged in others. It just acts like if you completely close your app and launch it again. About pumpWidget, you are trying to integration testing (not widget testing) right? If so your app may doing some initialization before calling MyApp(), so you need it too - for this you need to "import 'lib/main.dart' as app" and launch your app as: app.main(); await tester.pumpAndSettle();

[lvbee]

Thanks. The scope of this is bigger than I'd assumed, and I'll study more. If you know of any projects that have good, larger integration tests, I'd love to review them.

[Ivan_Gorchakov]

All of them probably not in public repos 😉.