On Sat, Jun 28, 2008 at 7:19 AM, Jonathan Vanasco <jona...@findmeon.com> wrote:

Well, JJ is right in a way. The session is supposed to hold state between web requests. So it makes sense that you'd set it up via web requests. Just like an application that requires login; you have to do the login request at the beginning of each test.

But I can also see the point of giving Pylons some premade session data, like a test with premade database data. In Mechanize you can precreate a CookieJar and seed it with cookies, and pass that to your fake browser object. You can also save the cookie jar to a file and reuse it later.

You can probably do something similar with Pylons. Give it a premade Beaker instance stuffed with a session, and seed the test "browser" with the same session ID. It may need a couple API changes somewhere to make it more convenient. For my screen scraper experiments I have a custom subclass of Mechanize that makes it easier to build a stuffed cookie jar. Perhaps the Beaker middleware could be taught to look for a premade Beaker instance somewhere before creating one. I'm just not sure where that "somewhere" would be.

If self.app.get() is the same as paste.fixture.TestApp.get(), there's an 'extra_environ' arg to pass variables to the (CGI?|WSGI?) environment. If you stuffed something there (a Beaker instance?) and the Beaker middleware found it in the environment, perhaps it could just use it.