2010/11/8-11 - whoops!

This week had good news and bad news - bad news first.

There was a little excitement this week as we accidentally released a bug to our live vufind server. On Monday we flipped the switch on a VM Clint had prepared for release that included a bug (that I wrote - ugh!) in the AJAX handler that marries a call-number to its proper item in a search result. The bug had gone unnoticed on our test server for over a week, and didn't lead to serious problems till Monday night, when search results started popping up with wacky call numbers. The reference desk paged systems, but the page went unnoticed till Tuesday morning (before I came in), when Denise and Jon called Clint at home on vacation. Clint quickly found the bad commit I had checked in, and reverted the bug back out. I keep expecting someone to throw a fit, but people have been cool, so maybe I'm too cynical.

The good news was that Claudine signed off on the metadata massaging that my import program runs through to marry her collection of scans with catalog MARC records for import into d-space. This project has been lingering since June - hopefully the end is in sight. I'll import the rest of the collection on Monday, and setup some initial XSL for Marliese to index the collection into vufind on devcat.

Finally, the vufind bug inspired me to setup some vufind regressions. The following e-mail excerpt explains what I did.

--- Reuben Pasquini 11/13/10 8:52 PM ---
Hi Clint!

I setup a framework for vufind regression tests that we can
add to over time.
    http://code.google.com/p/littleware/source/browse/?repo=catalog#hg/VufindRegression/src/main/scala/edu/auburn/library/tool/vufindTest

You can download a build of the test runner at:
    http://devcat.lib.auburn.edu/tests/vufindTest.zip
- just run 'vufindTest.bat'.

The test suite currently just runs through 3 sets of tests against devcat.
The first test runs a "Harry Potter" search (
    using HtmlUnit http://htmlunit.sourceforge.net/
), and verifies that the results include a couple expected records,
and that the call-numbers are correct on those 2 records.

The second test loads a specific Harry Potter record, then
checks the title,
verifies that the record has some holdings information,
and checks that the "campus delivery" cookies are set.

Finally, the third test accesses
    http://devcat.lib.auburn.edu/vufind/AuburnTestSuite.php
which runs through a suite of PHP unit tests
    http://devcat.lib.auburn.edu/cgi-bin/hgwebdir.cgi/vufind/file/tip/web/AuburnTestSuite.php

Anyway, we can start running these regressions before releasing new code.
I can set you up with a copy of the code if you want to add some tests.
I want to add tests that directly access some of the AJAX services, 
add a test fixture for Solr.php,
and setup a Hudson server (http://hudson-ci.org/) to
automatically run the tests whenever we commit some code to the vufind repository,
but I probably won't get to that for a while ...

Let me know if you run into problems with the test runner ...

Cheers,
Reuben