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LMFDB / lmfdb

L-Functions and Modular Forms Database
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Testing without rendering webpages #6249

Open roed314 opened 1 week ago

roed314 commented 1 week ago

Almost all of the current testing the LMFDB is of the form

  1. Create a webpage
  2. Search for strings in the resulting html

While this is good for ensuring that our core product is functional, it has a cost in that rendering pages is somewhat slow. This makes certain kinds of automated tests not a good idea (we already have to split our testing up into a bunch of different jobs on Github's CI).

There are other kinds of tests that we can add, where we run unit tests on functions without rendering a webpage. For example, see this test I just added in #6248. To be specific, I think we should

  1. Add tests for many of the functions in the lmfdb.utils folder
  2. Add tests for the methods on backend objects like WebAbstractGroup.