This is somewhat deep R testing question, and as such, I'm not sure if general Stack Overflow is the right place for it, or if there's an R specific forum that would be better. Any pointers on that are welcome.
The scenario is: I have package that is using testthat and has some tests in tests/testthat and (for reasons that are important but, to be honest, I don't totally understand) there are some other tests in inst/validation that need to be run as well, as part of a validation script (i.e. the script that this post is about).
I was running test_check(pkg) in my tests folder and it was working fine, but I wasn't getting the extra tests (which makes sense). So then I switched to the following:
test_dirs <- c("tests/testthat", "inst/validation")
for (.t in test_dirs) {
test_dir(.t)
}
Now a bunch of my tests are failing because they can't find some of the constants, etc. that are part of my package! (see note at the bottom for more details...)
So I dig in to the source code and find that test_check() actually calls testthat:::test_package_dir under the hood. Note the ::: this is an unexported function, so I don't really just want to call it in my own code.
testthat:::test_package_dir in turn calls the following, before calling test_dir() itself:
env <- test_pkg_env(package)
withr::local_options(list(topLevelEnvironment = env))
withr::local_envvar(list(
TESTTHAT_PKG = package,
TESTTHAT_DIR = maybe_root_dir(test_path)
))
test_dir(...
Sooooo... it seems like test_check() essentially just does some things to load the package environment (note test_pkg_env is also unexported) and then calls test_dir().
So I guess my question is: why? I've actually noticed this before with test_file() not working because it doesn't have everything in the package environment. Why do these functions not load the package environment like the other testing functions do?
Or really, my question is: is there a way to make them load it? And specifically in my case, is there a way to do what I'm trying to do (run tests in a few different directories) and have it load the package environment?
I notice this in the test_dirs docs:
env -- Environment in which to execute the tests. Expert use only.
which is set to test_env() by default. I have a feeling this is my answer, but I can't figure out how to get the package environment without basically copy/pasting a bunch of code out of functions that are hidden in :::. Perhaps I don't qualify as an "expert"...
Thanks for any insight and/or solutions!
note at the bottom:
Specifically my issue is that I have some "constants" in my aaa.R that are mostly just hard-coded strings or lists like:
SUMMARY_NAME <- "summary"
SUMMARY_COUNT <- "sum_count"
SUMMARY_PATH <- "sum_path"
SUM_REQ_COLS <- list(
list(name = SUMMARY_NAME, type = "character"),
list(name = SUMMARY_COUNT, type = "numeric"),
list(name = SUMMARY_PATH, type = "character"),
)
These are things that I use for checking S3 classes and other purposes so that I don't have hard-coded strings all over my code. The point is: I use some of these in my tests, which works fine for test_check() and devtools::check() and devtools::test() but dies when I try to use test_dir() or test_file() because they can't be found, presumably because the package environment isn't loaded.