scenarios

The idea behind ‘scenarios’ is simple. Scenarions are basically just organized bits of arbitrary ruby code.

why?

Here’s why scenarios were originally written … you may use them however you wish!

I had a Rails application and I wanted to be able to do something like this:

    $ rake scenarios:load SCENARIO=one_thousand_users

… which would put 1,000 users in the database.

Sometimes, while testing out my application’s functionality in a browser, I would want to setup some scenario to test. Maybe I’m working on X feature and it would be helpful if I had Y data in the database to work with. Typically, I would open up `script/console` and create abunchof Y data manually. But … wouldn’t it be useful if we could automate that?

Also, our application requires some data to be in the database for the app to load properly. So we created a scenario that loads up the minimum amount of data required to run the app!

documentation

Read the RDoc

how?

    $ sudo gem install remi-scenarios -s http://gems.github.com

then, if you’re in a Rails project …

    $ ./script/generate scenario Foo

to see all defined scenarios …

    $ rake scenarios

to load a particular scenario …

    $ rake scenarios:load NAME=my_scenario
    $ rake scenarios:load NAME=my_scenario,and_some_more_scenarios

what else?

more documentation to come soon!

TODO

• add a ‘scenario’ bin script so you don’t necessarily have to use rake? potentially? maybe check for local .scenariorc?
• should be able to ‘show’ a full, long description of what a scenario does (full header comment)
• document the context that scenarios are loaded within … right now we’re using #load, which is nice because it gets line numbers for exceptions … altho eval’ing the code gives us more control over the context its loaded in
• add dependencies so one scenario can call another one
• make the scenario directory for the generator configurable (and that dir should always be included in the Scenario loadpath
• make all scenarios load within a specific context and add hooks so people can update/modify that context
• write a spec to make sure that the load paths work properly and multiple directories can have scenarios with the same name … the directories added last should override the previous ones. also make sure paths are uniq … if i add ‘foo’ and ‘foo’ is already there, it should make foo the last path (move it to the end)