[Haskell-cafe] Unit Testing with Control.Proxy

[Renzo Carbonara]

On Tue, Apr 16, 2013 at 2:45 PM, Dan <wilsonhardrock at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've discovered the excellent proxy library recently and one thing strikes
> me. How do you unit test a proxy? Are there any specific methods or
> workflows for doing this cleanly and consistently?

I don't think it's different from testing other normal Haskell
code. And as such, you will need to consider the particulars of the
base monad you are using for your proxies. For example, if your base
monad is 'IO', then you should reason about your unit tests and
properties the same way you would for any other non-pipes 'IO' code you
test.

Below is a simple working example that tests a simple proxy using both
HUnit and QuickCheck. I find the 'toListD' Proxy particularly useful in
cases like these.

  module Main where

  import           Control.Proxy ((>->))
  import qualified Control.Proxy as P
  import           Test.HUnit
  import           Test.QuickCheck

  -- | This Proxy doubles Int values flowing downstream.
  doublerD :: (Monad m, P.Proxy p) => a' -> p a' Int a' Int m r
  doublerD = P.mapD (*2)

  -- | A unit test about 'doublerD'
  test_doublerD :: Test
  test_doublerD = [2,4,6] ~=? actual where
    actual = let session = P.fromListS [1,2,3] >-> doublerD >-> P.toListD
             in  head . P.execWriterT . P.runProxy $ session

  -- | A property we can test about 'doublerD' using QuickCheck
  prop_doublerD :: [Int] -> Bool
  prop_doublerD xs = expected == actual where
    expected = fmap (*2) xs
    actual = let session = P.fromListS xs >-> doublerD >-> P.toListD
             in  head . P.execWriterT . P.runProxy $ session

  main :: IO ()
  main = do
    putStrLn "HUnit tests:"      >> runTestTT  test_doublerD
    putStrLn "QuickCheck tests:" >> quickCheck prop_doublerD

And the output, after running the code:

  HUnit tests:
  Cases: 1  Tried: 1  Errors: 0  Failures: 0
  QuickCheck tests:
  +++ OK, passed 100 tests.


Regards,

Renzo Carbonara.