[Grok-dev] want to use Utility for test - but where to put it?

[Brandon Craig Rhodes]

Yesterday I puzzled over how to build tests for my application that
accesses objects from our relational database.  After some discussion,
I realized that I wanted to provide the database as a utility!  (When
I went to check, the Zope Book actually lists database access as the
very first example of a reason why you would want a utility!)

So if I define "IMageDB" as an interface that lets the caller search
for and create database objects, then my code that needs to access
objects can run:

    >>> db = getUtility(IMageDB)
    >>> p = db.Person('900010011')
    >>> print p.name
    'Rhodes,Brandon C'

When my Grok instance actually runs, I want to provide a "real"
IMageDB utility, "MageDB", that actually connects to the database.
But when doing tests, I do not want to have to create and populate a
whole database, so I want to register a "FakeMageDB" utility that
keeps everything in RAM so that I can create a few objects for each
test that will go away when the test finishes running.

This leads to some questions.

Where can I put modules that are not tests, but are used to support
tests?  I want a "fakedb.py" module that provides the RAM-only IMageDB
utility, that tests can import, but that will *not* be imported when I
run the main application.  I had thought that putting it in the
"tests" directory would be enough to avoid its being grokked at
instance runtime; but I was wrong!

It looks like Grok currently loads every module that does not begin
with "test" when running an instance!  This surprised me.  I had not
expected things put in the "tests" module to be available at instance
runtime.  Furthermore, this gives me nowhere to "hide" alternate
implementations of utilities for testing purposes.

I did try putting my utility in a module named "test_fakedb.py",
thinking that I would have my tests "import tests.test_fakedb", and
that the "test" name would hide it from the instance.  But since this
makes it look like a test, the test runner gives the error:

    AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'test_suite'

I could add an empty test at the bottom of "test_fakedb.py", of
course, but that seems unforgivably kludgey!

Could Grok adopt the rule that the instance ignores modules inside of
"tests" directories?

Or am I approaching this wrong to begin with?

-- 
Brandon Craig Rhodes   brandon at rhodesmill.org   http://rhodesmill.org/brandon