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IocTestFramework: Generalise to work for CLF #6742

Open DominicOram opened 3 years ago

DominicOram commented 3 years ago

As a developer in CLF I would like to make use of the IOCTestFramework to test my IOCs. Some changes that need to be made to use it:

@chris-d-gregory is happy to do this work

DominicOram commented 3 years ago

@chris-d-gregory is there anything I've missed from that list?

DominicOram commented 3 years ago

I think I prefer option ii but open to others thoughts

rerpha commented 3 years ago

They are system tests at the end of the day, so should work over anything that can do channel access. Can we use https://nsls-ii.github.io/caproto/ like the forwarder?

DominicOram commented 3 years ago

Haha, that's the exact library CLF were proposing. I can see the argument that they're also testing genie_python for us to some extent but I dislike having the tests coupled like that, we should be testing genie_python separately

rerpha commented 3 years ago

yup I agree. option ii is the best in my eyes. I guess a fourth option would be to write a wrapper, so the ioc test framework is modular? that way we could use either/both. means we could use the same interface we're currently using.

JackEAllen commented 3 years ago

Is there any special need to stay with genie_python to justify a wrapper?

rerpha commented 3 years ago

Is there any special need to stay with genie_python to justify a wrapper?

Not that I can think of, but other group members may disagree

DominicOram commented 3 years ago

I think that's what I meant by option i. There's an argument there that it's good design practice to isolate it in a wrapper anyway so that we can swap to some other channel access library easily in the future if we had to. Maybe the best solution is to do ii but in a way that abstracts things so that we could go back to using genie_python if we want to

chris-d-gregory commented 3 years ago

Thanks @DominicOram - that covers everything that I can think of at the moment, but we haven't done much investigation yet. I did have a look about 6 months ago, and got it to run a single, simple test under linux with only minor changes. I used caproto to re-implement just enough of CaChannelWrapper and UnableToConnectToPVException to get my test to work.

FreddieAkeroyd commented 3 years ago

Keeping a wrapper also lets us test epics v4 to an ioc with p4p for example

FreddieAkeroyd commented 3 years ago

@chris-d-gregory a user on epics tech-talk would be interested in your CaChannelWrapper and UnableToConnectToPVException implementations

chris-d-gregory commented 3 years ago

Hi @FreddieAkeroyd - yes, just saw your post. It's not complete, just the minimum needed to get a simple test to work for me. It's a start though. I currently have it sitting in a clf-development branch on a fork of the ISIS EPICS-IOC_Test_Framework repo.

If this might have wider interest, would it make for someone in ISIS to make a branch off your repo for this work and I'll tidy up what I have and submit a PR?

DominicOram commented 3 years ago

I've created a PR for merging your work in @chris-d-gregory, I think just carry on pushing any tidying up you want to that branch and let us know when you're happy for us to review.