cstester - a tool for testing loading and painting of documents

[Thorsten Zachmann]

Hello all,

I'm currently working as part of my job for Nokia on cstester a tool to test 
loading and painting for stage, tables and words. The aim of the tool is to 
make sure there are no regressions added when features are modified. This is 
done by loading the document and comparing some pre generated images of the 
content with created images of the content. Also a good code coverage should 
be possible to reach by using this method it uses a lot of code when doing 
that.

The idea is to create a document set which contains features and test these 
documents on a regularly basis.

There are still some open questions:
- Most important one is how to make sure font rendering is always the same.
One idea here is to create a virtual image that can be used to run the tests.
- What is the best way to store the test set and images used for testing
Should we create a new repository where the documents are stored.
- How to automatically run the tests to find regressions.

I will shortly commit the branch cstester-zachmann

How does it work

Creating the images used for verifying

cstester --create test.odp

will create the test images used for comparison. One needs to make sure the 
images are as they are expected to be. The images to check will be created in 
the directory test.odp.check so you need write access to the directory the file 
is in.

Verifying that still all works fine

cstester --verify test.odp

This will load the document and create images of the content and then verify 
them against the images saved in test.odp.check

It is possible to run the tool on multiple files at once by specifying muliple 
files on the command line

cstester --create test1.odp test2.odp test3.ods test3.xls

Currently it has support for documents which are supported by stage and 
tables. words is going to follow. Other document types should be easy to add.

I also have plans for the future to extend the tool by:
- adding a save / load circle to test that all is saved and loaded correctly 
and we don't have any data loss there.
- adding odf verification for the saved data

Also we are working inside Nokia on a set of documents that can be used for 
this kind of testing. This documents will then be available for the community.

Thorsten