On Sat, Apr 18, 2009 at 7:02 PM, James Byrne <li...@ruby-forum.com> wrote: > I have a requirement to fetch a data feed from our central bank and set > a variety of currency exchange rates from that feed. My question is how > does one approach behavioural driven design with autonomous automated > processing? What I started with is this: > > Feature: Automatically Retrieve and Store Foreign Currency Exchange > Rates > In order to accurately set foreign currency exchange rates daily > The automated system > Should automatically retrieve and store central bank exchange rates > To Reduce Costs and Protect Revenue > > Scenario: Retrieve Exchange Rates from the Bank of Canada RSS feed > Given an RSS feed > "http://www.bankofcanada.ca/rss/fx/noon/fx-noon-all.xml"; > When I access the RSS feed > Then I should see "Bank of Canada: Noon Foreign Exchange Rates" > And I should see today's date in "yyyy-mm-dd" format > > Now, while I have a pretty good idea how I am going to accomplish this, > via cron and a standalone Ruby script, I am sort of perplexed about how > I should construct the feature step definitions and how I would test > this. I figure I just have to take as given that cron works because > that is not my code. But how best to test that the rest works?
I would probably approach it this way. - Make a local copy of the RSS feed you're expecting to import - Write a feature which specifies the command you want to run. This command would be the same command you used with cron. I would make it take a path or URI as an argument. - Have the feature ensure the the right number of records were created based on your local copy of the feed - Drop down to RSpec and re-use the local copy of the feed to ensure that all of the little details (if you have little details) are properly imported When that is done I would probably write a feature that actually hits the Bank of Canada's site, and I would set this up to run on continuous integration only. Maybe using Cucumber tags or a directory structure, and a new rake task to help isolate CI only features from the rest. Now when I run features locally I can be very very confident everything works, and if CI fails one day because the Bank of Canada changed their format, now you know you need to pull over a new copy of the feed locally, and update your local features and specs. That general approach has worked well in the past (and I say past because before Cucumber existed I still wrote features/scenarios with StoryRunner, and before that my team had tooled its own ad hoc story runner). HTH > > The automatic script will contain not much more than a list of the > external libraries a call to a methods in class that I have named > ForexCASource, loop through and map the returned array of hashes to the > corresponding CurrencyExchangeRate attributes of a new row, call #save! > and repeat until finished. > > How have others handled this sort of thing? > -- > Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/. > _______________________________________________ > rspec-users mailing list > rspec-users@rubyforge.org > http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rspec-users > -- Zach Dennis http://www.continuousthinking.com http://www.mutuallyhuman.com _______________________________________________ rspec-users mailing list rspec-users@rubyforge.org http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rspec-users
