Thanks for the tips, I like the suggestion of testing the document and query generation without having solr involved. That seems like a more bite-sized unit; I think I'll do that.
However, here's the test case that I'm considering where I'd like to have a live solr instance: During an exercise of optimizing our schema, I'm going to be making wholesale changes that I'd like to ensure don't break some portion of our app. It seems like a good method for this would be to write a test with the following steps: (arguably not a unit test, but a very valuable test indeed in our application) * take some defined model object generated at test time, store it in db * run it through our document creation code * submit it into solr * generate a query using our custom criteria-based generation code * ensure that the query returns the results as expected * flesh out the new model objects from the db using only the id fields returned from Solr * In the end, it would be expected to have model objects retrieved from the db that match model objects at the beginning of the test. These building blocks could be stacked in numerous ways to test almost all the different scenarios in which we use Solr. Also, when/if we start making solr config changes, I can ensure that they change nothing from my app's functional point of view (with the exception of ridding us of dreaded OOMs). Thanks, -Joe -----Original Message----- From: Eric Pugh [mailto:ep...@opensourceconnections.com] Sent: Friday, March 27, 2009 11:27 AM To: solr-user@lucene.apache.org Subject: Re: Best way to unit test solr integration So my first thought is that "unit test + solr integration" is an oxymoron. In the sense that unit test implies the smallest functional unit, and solr integration implies multiple units working together. It sounds like you have two different tasks. the code that generate queies, you can test that without Solr. If you need to parse some sort of solr document to generate a query based on it, then mock up the query. A lot of folks will just use Solr to build a result set, and then save that on the filesystem. "my_big_result1.xml" and read it in and feed it to your code. On the other hand, for you code testing indexing and retrieval, again, if you can use the same approach to decouple what solr does from your code. Unless you've patched Solr, you shouldn't need to unit test Solr, Solr has very nice unit testing built in. On the other hand, if you are doing integration testing, where you want a more end to end view of your application, then you probably already have a "test" solr setup in your environment somewhere that you can rely on to use. Spinning up and shutting down Solr for tests can be done, and I can think of use cases for why you might want to do it, but it does incur a penalty of being more work. And you still need to validate that your "embedded/unit test" solr works the same as your integration/test environment Solr. Eric On Mar 27, 2009, at 11:59 AM, Joe Pollard wrote: > Hello, > > On our project, we have quite a bit of code used to generate Solr > queries, and I need to create some unit tests to ensure that these > continue to work. In addition, I need to generate some unit tests > that will test indexing and retrieval of certain documents, based on > our current schema and the application logic that generates the > indexable documents as well as generates the Solr queries. > > My question is - what's the best way for me to unit test our Solr > integration? > > I'd like to be able to spin up an embedded/in-memory solr, or that > failing just start one up as part of my test case setup, fill it > with interesting documents, and do some queries, comparing the > results to expected results. > > Are there wiki pages or other documented examples of doing this? It > seems rather straight-forward, but who knows, it may be dead simple > with some unknown feature. > > Thanks! > -Joe ----------------------------------------------------- Eric Pugh | Principal | OpenSource Connections, LLC | 434.466.1467 | http://www.opensourceconnections.com Free/Busy: http://tinyurl.com/eric-cal
