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A comment on I don’t buy “duplication is cheaper than the wrong abstraction” (2021). Parent comment

Re:I don’t buy “duplication is cheaper than the wrong abstra... by ezekg on Tuesday August 29, 2023 @03:27PM (#37312656)
> I personally find tests that have a ton of extra helper classes/functions to do stuff like set up fixtures or do assertions to be painful to deal with.

I think it depends on the context. For example, I typically agree, but when I was writing authz tests [0], I ended up writing a DSL so that 1) I'd more more inclined to write the thousands and thousands of tests, and 2) I'd be able to focus on the actual authz assertion and not on verbose setup.

I couldn't imagine writing those policy tests without that abstraction. I would have lost my mind with all of the repetition, and would have almost assuredly made mistakes.

[0]: https://github.com/keygen-sh/keygen-api/blob/master/spec/pol...

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Re:I don’t buy “duplication is cheaper than the wrong abstra... by HumanOstrich on Tuesday August 29, 2023 @06:38PM (#37315072)
Thank you for the link. This is inspiring. Do you have any resources you could link to that would explain some or all of the style for these tests?
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Re:I don’t buy “duplication is cheaper than the wrong abstra... by ezekg on Tuesday August 29, 2023 @11:30PM (#37317333)
Honestly, I don't have many resources to provide. I read a lot of policy tests via GitHub search (e.g. path:spec/policies/*/*.rb), but couldn't find anything that looked like what I wanted. I wrote the DSL as-needed in order to fully test my app's authz while migrating from Pundit to ActionPolicy (while also introducing fine-grained permissions).

It's not the prettiest when you actually look beneath the covers [0], but it does what I wanted -- providing an easy way to write exhaustive authz tests. Without the DSL, I probably wouldn't have written the tests. The PR for said migration was massive [1], and was a prerequisite to going open source [2].

[0]: https://github.com/keygen-sh/keygen-api/blob/master/spec/sup...

[1]: https://github.com/keygen-sh/keygen-api/pull/647

[2]: https://github.com/keygen-sh/keygen-api/issues/644

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Re:I don’t buy “duplication is cheaper than the wrong abstra... by HumanOstrich on Wednesday August 30, 2023 @01:03AM (#37317880)
Thanks! I'll dig around in the pull request and issue as well.
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