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Testing and Validating Algorithms

There are 2 ways to run tests:

  • iguana_test: an installed executable used for running single tests; this offers more control at the expense of being less user friendly
  • meson test: user-friendly automation of iguana_test

Important

Both of these assume you are currently in your build directory. Iguana must first be installed, so the compiled algorithms can find certain dependent files.

Tip

All of the available tests run automatically on the Continuous Integration (CI), so if you are developing and you submit a pull requests, you may rely on the CI logs to check if the tests were successful

iguana_test

iguana_test is found both in the installation's bin/ directory and in your build directory, 

src/iguana/tests/iguana_test   # assuming your build directory layout is 'mirror' (the default)
Run iguana_test for a usage guide: 
src/iguana/tests/iguana_test            # usage guide
src/iguana/tests/iguana_test validator  # usage of the 'validator' command
src/iguana/tests/iguana_test algorithm  # usage of the 'algorithm' command
For example, 
src/iguana/tests/iguana_test validator -f ../data.hipo -n 0 -a clas12::MomentumCorrectionValidator -o ../validator_output
will run the validator MomentumCorrectionValidator using data from ../data.hipo and write its output to ../validator_output/.

meson test

This section shows some useful meson test commands; for more guidance, run meson test --help.

Running single tests

To list the available tests, run one of the following: 

meson test --list                    # list all available tests
meson test --list --suite validator  # list the 'validator' tests
meson test --list --suite algorithm  # list the 'algorithm' tests

  • the validator suite runs the algorithm validators
  • the algorithm suite just runs the algorithms

In the following example commands, let's run a test with the name 

iguana:validator / validator-clas12-MyAlgorithm
To run this test (which may fail, see below): 
meson test validator-clas12-MyAlgorithm           # just run it
meson test validator-clas12-MyAlgorithm --verbose # run and show output (stdout and stderr)
If you have not supplied the required arguments, in particular the input data file, the test will fail. For the validator and algorithm test suites, iguana_test validator and iguana_test algorithm are the respective underlying test executable commands; you may pass arguments to them using the --test-args option; for example: 
meson test validator-clas12-MyAlgorithm --verbose --test-args '\-f ../my_hipo_file.hipo \-n 300 \-o ../validator_output'
See above for iguana_test usage guidance.

Note

Note the usage of an escaped hyphen, \- instead of -; depending on your system, you may or may not need to use escaped hyphens in --test-args arguments, otherwise you will see errors such as argument --test-args: expected one argument.

Alternatively to using --test-args, you may set default iguana_test arguments using Iguana build options:

  • The options that are relevant for tests are prefixed by test_
  • Set options using meson configure and re-running meson install (see the setup guide for guidance)
  • Using --test-args will override these build options.

Running multiple tests

For multiple tests, it's strongly recommended to use build options rather than --test-args. To run multiple tests, just omit the test name: 

meson test                        # run all of the tests
meson test --suite validator      # run all of the validator tests
meson test --suite validator -j4  # with 4 parallel processes

Tip

if you are testing on a large data set, you may need to increase the timeout with the -t option and parallelize with the -j option