Sunday, March 14, 2010

Testing Excel with Cucumber

Testing an Excel application with Ruby's unit testing tool is doable, however, the tests are not easily readable. Why not using Given/When/Then structured Cucumber tests instead? Cucumber is an active open source project enjoying great popularity in the Rails universe. I won’t be describing the tool in this blog post, if you’re new to Cucumber, please visit the official website or read the excellent Cucumber book to learn more about it.

Here is the task I need to write tests for: we have a basic Excel spreadsheet with a handful of cells in it.



The row cells with yellow background are the column headers. Column cells starting from A2 are captions. "Category1" has three child elements and "Category2" has only two. The category rows are calculated by the sum of their children. Value Total is the sum of Value1 and Value2 for each row. The totals in the bottom are calculated by adding up Category1 and Category2 values.

First I'd like to verify that the column headers and captions are in place. I started writing my feature this way:

Feature: Modify values in the Excel sheet
In order to show my power
  As a user
  I want to interact with Excel

Scenario: Display column headers and captions
  Given I have 2 categories
    And I have 3 child elements under the first category
  When I open the Excel workbook
  Then I should see "Category" in the "A1" cell
    And I should see "Value Total" in the "B1" cell
    And I should see "Value1" in the "C1" cell
    And I should see "Value2" in the "D1" cell
    And I should see "Category1" in the "A2" cell
    And I should see "Child1" in the "A3" cell
    And I should see "Child2" in the "A4" cell

I created the following folder structure:
/features
  |
  |-- step_definitions
  |      |-- excel_handler.rb
  |      |-- excel_steps.rb
  |-- support
  |      |-- env.rb
  | - excel.feature

The feature from above was saved in the excel.feature file.

I am not particularly concerned with the "Given" part of the scenario. The data can be loaded into Excel either from a CSV, XML or a remote data store. I'll ignore this part to keep my examples clear and concise.

My previous blog post described how I can interact with Excel through the great WIN32OLE object. I created the ExcelHandler class which does that:
class ExcelHandler
  include Singleton

  # set this to your Excel file path
  @@excel_file_path = 'C:\Temp\TestWorkbook.xlsx'
  def open_excel
    begin
      @excel = WIN32OLE.connect('excel.application')
      @wb = @excel.ActiveWorkbook
    rescue
      @excel = WIN32OLE::new('excel.application')
      @excel.visible =true
      @wb = @excel.Workbooks.Open(@@excel_file_path )
    end
  end
end

I might not have the most elegant code in the open_excel method, but this allows me to attach to a running instance of the Excel workbook which is a big thing for me. In case the workbook has not been launched yet, I take care of it here. Launching and closing Excel takes time and resources, I'd like to reuse running instances of Excel whenever I can.

I take advantage of the singleton pattern in this class. Starting up Excel is an expensive operation, I want to make sure that one and only instance is handling the workbook. My tests are single threaded, I think I should be safe there.

The env.rb file has the require statements:
require 'spec/expectations'
require 'win32ole'
require 'singleton'

All the magic happens in the excel_steps.rb file:
When /^I open the Excel workbook$/ do
  ExcelHandler.instance.open_excel
  @worksheet = ExcelHandler.instance.worksheet
  @worksheet.extend CellValueGetter
end

Then /^I should see "([^\"]*)" in the "([^\"]*)" cell$/ do |value, cell|
  @worksheet.get_cell_value(cell).strip.should == value
end

module CellValueGetter
  def get_cell_value(cell)
    get_cell(cell).value
  end

  def set_cell_value(cell, value)
    get_cell(cell).value = value
  end

  def get_cell(cell)
    cell_values = cell.split('')
    cell_values.length.should == 2
    cells(cell_values[1].to_i, cell_values[0])
  end
end

Look at how I add methods to the @worksheet object. You gotta love Ruby for that!
The methods in this module are responsible for getting and setting a value based on the provided cell.
I left out the Given parts that I ignore anyway. You can look at the entire source code after you pulled it from my github account.
When I execute "cucumber features" in the command prompt I get this:

1 scenario (1 passed)
10 steps (10 passed)
0m0.027s

Hey, the first scenario is passing!!

All right, let's verify in the second scenario that the data was loaded correctly:

Scenario: Display loaded values
  Given I have 2 categories
    And I have 3 child elements under the first category
  When I open the Excel workbook
  Then I should see 111 in the "C3" cell
    And I should see 353 in the "C2" cell
    And I should see 458 in the "B3" cell
    And I should see 1523 in the "B2" cell


I had to add one step definition to the excel_step.rb file:
Then /^I should see (\d+) in the "([^\"]*)" cell$/ do |value, cell|
  @worksheet.get_cell_value(cell).should == value.to_i
end

When I execute "cucumber features" in the command prompt I see this:

1 scenario (1 passed)
7 steps (7 passed)
0m0.024s


I know I am not using the "Given" part of the scenarios, however, I do repeat code there. I used the background feature of Cucumber and DRY-ed up my scenarios a little bit.

Background:
Given I have 2 categories
And I have 3 child elements under the first category


I use scenario outline in my third scenario. I set the "Value1" cell for the "Child1" row to 211. Take a look at the result in Excel:



I also try to set the same cell to 51, I got these numbers then:



I am verifying numbers in red in the last scenario:

Scenario Outline: Change values
  Given the default values were loaded
  When I open the Excel workbook
    And I put <child1_value> in the "C3" cell
  Then I should see <category_value1> in the "C2" cell
    And I should see <child1_sum> in the "B3" cell
    And I should see <category_total> in the "B2" cell
    And I should see <value1_total> in the "C9" cell

Examples:
| child1_value | category_value1 | child1_sum | category_total | value1_total |
| 211 | 453 | 558 | 1623 | 1281 |
| 51 | 293 | 398 | 1463 | 1121 |


I added the following step to the excel_steps.rb file:
When /^I put (\d+) in the "([^\"]*)" cell$/ do |value, cell|
  @worksheet.set_cell_value(cell, value)
end

Let's see what we get now:

2 scenarios (2 passed)
18 steps (18 passed)
0m0.038s


All the scenarios passed individually; let's see how we do when we execute them all at once:

4 scenarios (4 passed)
37 steps (37 passed)
0m3.718s


Everything is rock solid so far. Am I testing the right file? I change the first scenario's "Then I should see "Category" in the "A1" cell" line to this: "Then I should see "CategoryABC" in the "A1" cell".
When I execute "cucumber features" I get the following output:

4 scenarios (1 failed, 3 passed)
37 steps (1 failed, 6 skipped, 30 passed)
0m3.710s

I see that the scenario I just changed is now failing:

Then I should see "CategoryABC" in the "A1" cell # features/step_definitions/excel_steps.rb:23
  expected: "CategoryABC",
    got: "Category" (using ==)
  Diff:
  @@ -1,2 +1,2 @@
  -CategoryABC
  +Category
  (Spec::Expectations::ExpectationNotMetError)
  ./features/step_definitions/excel_steps.rb:24:in `/^I should see "([^\"]*)" in the "([^\"]*)" cell$/'
features\excel.feature:13:in `Then I should see "CategoryABC" in the "A1" cell'


I change it back to the original one and everything is OK again.

One more thing I need to do: when the feature is complete, I'd like to close Excel.

I use the cucumber's at_exit hook to accomplish that:
at_exit do
  ExcelHandler.instance.close_excel
end

When I execute the cucumber feature I see Excel popping up and closing down.
What if I wanted to run the feature in headless mode? It's simple, I just have to change the @excel.visible = true value to false in the excel_handler.rb file.

I think cucumber is a great way to automate testing on an Excel spreadsheet. The cucumber features can serve both as requirement documents and test scripts, hence providing executable documentation. They are easy to read and understand for the entire team.

You can get the demo's source code from my github account.

I developed the code on Windows 7 using ruby version 1.9.1. You also need cucumber and the rspec gems installed to run the code.

Happy coding!