chai-tbd

An extension for chai to create failing to be done tasks.

Installation

• You need to have npm installed.
• Use
  • npm install chai-tbd to retrieve the module or
  • npm install chai-tbd -D to save the developer dependency to your package.json.

Guide

When defining tests, I often start to write down the stubs for the tests I will have to implement. When finished I start to fill them with life. My problem was, what to do with those tests that have to be done.

With mocha you are able to simply leave the function out of the it command to mark it as pending.

describe('incomplete feature', function() {
  it('misses tests');
});

That's good, but actually, I wanted my tests to fail with a message.

So chai has the fail expression, to... well, to fail. So I could use that one. A little bit of a problem is, that its purpose is the use in custom validations. This is the reason, why the signature is not that handy.

describe('incomplete feature', function() {
  it('misses tests', function() {
    expect.fail('foo', 'bar', 'To be done!');
  });
});

Ok, you could also use null instead of 'foo' and 'bar', but that does not make it much nicer.

Long story short, I wrote this module to handle this situation.

var tbd = require('chai-tbd');

describe('incomplete feature', function() {
  it('misses tests', function() {
    tbd();
  });
});

You will have a clean stacktrace in your output:

  1) incomplete feature:
     AssertionError: To be done!
      at Context.<anonymous> (test/index.js:5:5)

If you want a special message in some cases, you can hand it over as an argument.

describe('incomplete feature', function() {
  it('misses tests', function() {
    tbd('I will implement this later');
  });
});

And if you don't like the common message "To be done!", you can configure it as well at retrieval time.

var notImplemented = require('chai-tbd').complain('Not implemented yet');

describe('incomplete feature', function() {
  it('misses tests', function() {
    notImplemented();
  });
});

API

tbd([message])

When called, this function throws an chai.AssertionError with the message "To be done!". The optional message param can be used to change the reason.
Note, that you can create a function with a permanent message, using tbd.complain(message).

tbd.complain(message)

This will return a function, that throws an chai.AssertionError with the given message. The returned function behaves exactly like tbd([message]) except, that its default reason is the message given.

License

MIT