[GSOC] Data model unit testing

[Christian Stimming]

Am Freitag, 1. April 2011 schrieb John Ralls:
> I found the most heavily used to be QofObject, Guid, and gnc-numeric with
> 197, 197, and 174 external references respectively. However, the latter
> two are straightforward data manipulation libraries (which probably belong
> in core-utils anyway, as does gnc-date (42)) and testing will be pretty
> simple. I think you can ignore them.
> 
> QofObject is an interface description which is widely used and needs to be
> very thoroughly tested. Next on the list is QofInstance (105), the only
> direct GObject subclass and the base class for 14 engine classes. It has a
> helper class, QofId (34) which will probably need to be tested in concert
> with it. qof_util.c (22) implements some important transactional functions
> which we need to ensure work perfectly and then use widely.
> 
> QofSession (48) is very important and has some of the most convoluted code.
> it shares with QofBook (72) the organization of the objects upon which
> Gnucash operates. They have a major helper class KVP_Frame (71) which
> isn't in any object framework AFAICT, it's just normal functional C. It's
> one of our major problem areas with the sql backend and has no test
> coverage.

I agree that the following list should be the highest priority for 
unittesting:
- QofObject
- QofInstance
- QofSession
- QofBook
- kvp_frame

> QofQuery (50), QofEvent (43), and QofClass (30) form another work group
> which is supposed to abstract data retrieval. I haven't yet worked out
> whether it's a useful abstraction, though, so perhaps it can be lower
> priority.

Right, those would be lower priority. The QofQuery code might need 
modification and unittesting once we try to go into the multi-user backend 
direction, but that is not yet the case.

> QofBackend (10) is an interface that is tested adequately for now; its
> users are in src/backend.

Agreed.

> QofLog (9) is mostly a wrapper around the g_log
> functions from GLib. It's not worth any testing effort.
> 
> Groups with no outside users are QofGobject, QofSql, QofSerialize, and
> QofDeserialize. Those with very few and which I haven't looked at in
> detail are QofReference (1), QofChoice (6), and Md5.

All those latter ones are probably strong candidates to be removed (and QofLog 
replaced by pure g_log usage). Maybe I'll just start removing those where it 
can easily be confirmed that no-one uses them inside gnucash. But that's 
surely not Muslim's task here.

Regards,

Christian