Support external variables in tests?

[ajoslin]

I love autodoc, I love the inline testing and doc generating, and I love how it encourages me to write simple tiny testable functions :-)

One question I have is: is there a way to allow external variables in a test?

Eg one of my functions uses _.filter, and I can't figure out how to make autodoc's testing find/have _.

Am I missing something or is this just not a feature yet?

[dtao]

Thanks for the kind words! And thanks for trying out autodoc; as I'm sure you're aware, it is really early at this point and so you may find yourself encountering bugs and weird behavior.

As for this issue, the answer to the general question is: You're not missing anything; external variables is just a tricky thing I haven't 100% figured out how to deal with yet (though I have some ideas). I.e., I don't have a great mechanism in place for providing access within a @private function to variables that were declared outside of that function's scope.

That said, for this specific case, what you're trying to access can be marked as a global from autodoc's perspective and it should work. I.e., when running your tests use the --globals flag:

autodoc -t --globals _:underscore your_file.js

The --globals option accepts a comma-separated list, where each item looks like variable:library (so in the example above the variable _ will be assigned to the result of require("underscore")).

Note that this only works as of 0.5.2, which I just published. (In 0.5.2 the --globals option expected all references to be to relative paths, which didn't make sense in retrospect.)

[ajoslin]

Awesome, thanks :-)

Just tried the --globals and I think I found a bug: since I'm using autodoc cli, it's trying to require() my modules from /usr/local/share/npm/lib/node_modules/autodoc/bin, and it gives Cannot find module 'lodash' error.

Here is my command with the error:

autodoc --test --globals _:lodash helpers/*.js

I fixed it by setting NODE_PATH:

NODE_PATH=$PWD/node_modules autodoc --test --globals _:lodash helpers/*.js

Not sure how you can set NODE_PATH programatically or I would open a PR.

[dtao]

Yeah you're right, I think I kinda botched that. I guess for now it will only work with packages you've installed globally w/ npm install -g. I'm glad you found a workaround, though! As for the proper fix, I'll look into it and close this issue when I figure out the right approach.