[LRUG] Testing PDFs

Jay Caines-Gooby jay at gooby.org
Tue Aug 1 23:51:20 PDT 2017


We use acts-as-flying-saucer - it generates pdfs from erb & css, so rather
than testing the pdf itself, you could test the generated xhtml that
creates the pdfs...

On 1 August 2017 at 20:00, Mark Burns <markthedeveloper at gmail.com> wrote:

> Has anyone any recommendations or suggestions for testing PDF generation?
>
> I'm working on a side project and using Prawn. Which is great. I can
> programmatically generate large aspects of the content I want.
>
> But so far I've been tweaking then looking at the result in the browser.
> It's not an absolute nightmare - a few seconds to render. But it's hard to
> know whether the result is working without actually looking at it.
>
> The DSL is nice, but very imperative. Mocking method calls out would be
> insane.
>
> I'm managing to refactor into small objects to represent the components
> and layout, pages, typography aspects etc of the document. Which brings the
> complexity back down to manageable chunks.
>
> But ultimately everything just calls underlying prawn DSL methods. So I
> can test little bits of logic that I have in my objects, but ultimately
> whether it works or not comes down to "have a look and see".
>
> Perhaps the best I can hope for is screenshotting when I'm happy and using
> approvals to verify each major change hasn't radically borked everything.
>
> It seems like there are tools to test which strings get into the document,
> but that seems like the easiest part. And probably the only part I'd be
> happy with test doubles for prawn and setting expectations on the text
> generating methods.
>
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-- 
Jay Caines-Gooby
http://jay.gooby.org
jay at gooby.org
+44 (0)7956 182625
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