I spent this evening playing with Roo, the ruby library for reading data from spreadsheets and I am very impressed. In a very small amount of time I was able to define tests in four different forms/places and could execute my tests from each of these:

• An Excel file (.xls): stored locally
• An OpenOffice (.ods): stored locally
• An Excel file (.xls) stored in a Confluence wiki page with Confluence Office Connector; and
• A Google Docs spreadsheet.

The great thing about Roo is that you don’t actually need Excel; Roo simply reads the file, unlike the ruby Excel COM WIN32 API I have used previously.

The spreadsheet (embedded in Confluence) looks like this:

The cool thing about embedding it in Confluence is that you can click the title of the spreadsheet to edit it (in OpenOffice in my case).

I made some minor changes to my existing code that executed my depot tests from a wiki page, and it was as easy as that. A data driven Watir solution with four possible ways to define test cases. Cool.

You can find all the code needed below.

require 'watir'
require 'rubygems'
require 'roo'
require './Customer.rb'
require './Common.rb'

case ARGV[0]
when "excel"
	ss = Excel.new("watirmelon.xls")
when "wiki"
	ss = Excel.new("http://localhost:8080/download/attachments/2097153/watirmelon.xls")
when "gdocs"
	ss = Google.new("http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pEcLrW3b2djraE8JF_2fJWA")
else
	ss = Openoffice.new("watirmelon.ods")
end

ss.default_sheet = ss.sheets.first
ss.first_row.upto(ss.last_row) do |line|
	if ss.cell(line,1).strip != "Function" then #We have an executable test
		begin
			module_name = ss.cell(line,1).strip
			method_name = ss.cell(line,2).downcase.strip.sub(' ','_') # automatically determine function name based upon method name.
			comments = ss.cell(line,3).strip
			expected_outcome = ss.cell(line,4).strip
			expected_error = ss.cell(line,5).strip
			required_module = Kernel.const_get(module_name)
			required_method = required_module.method(method_name)
			arity = required_method.arity() # this is how many arguments the method requires, it is negative if a 'catch all' is supplied.
			arity = ((arity * -1) - 1) if arity < 0
			parameters = []
			1.upto(arity) do |p|
				parameters.push(ss.cell(line,p+5))
			end
			actual_outcome, actual_output = required_method.call(*parameters)
			# determine the result.
			if (expected_outcome = 'Success') and actual_outcome then
			    result = "PASS"
			elsif (expected_outcome = 'Error') and (not actual_outcome) and (expected_error = actual_output) then
			    result = "PASS"
			else
			    result = "FAIL"
			end
			puts "\nRunning Test: #{method_name} for #{module_name}."
			puts "Expected Outcome: #{expected_outcome}."
			puts "Expected Error: #{expected_error}."
			puts "Actual Outcome: #{actual_outcome}."
			puts "Actual Output: #{actual_output}."
			puts "RESULT: #{result}"
		rescue
			puts "An error occurred: #{$!}"
		end
	end
end

See the full test code below the break.

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