Hi Greg, I appreciate your response! Thanks for clarifying the capabilities and limitations of the current functional testing framework. (BTW, did you mean "current" as in "current on galaxy-dist" or also "current on galaxy-central" ?) If I can find the time, these are areas I would be interested in helping enhance. Sorry my diction was unclear; by "output files" I meant the transient files that a running job is free to create and manipulate in its job_working_directory. (I'm writing "transient" rather than "temporary" to avoid confusion with, e.g. files created with tempfile.mkstemp - although conceivably one might want to be able to inspect their contents on failure as well, actually saving them might be a very different problem.) Normally, upon successful or failed job completion the job working directory and anything in it are erased. For certain tools, it could be helpful in debugging if the developer (or Galaxy system administrator) were able to inspect their contents to see, for instance, if they are properly formed. I can disable removal of job working directories globally, but then of course the job working directories also persist for successful jobs, which can add up to a lot of unnecessary storage (the reason they're deleted by default in the first place). I'm not sure how work is divided on your team, but can you tell me (a) if the preceding paragraphs actually clarify anything for you, and (b) whether that issue is on the radar of your team and specifically on the radar of the primary developer(s) / maintainer(s) of the testing framework? Thanks again for responding to my email. Best, Eric ________________________________ From: Greg Von Kuster [greg@bx.psu.edu] Sent: Wednesday, November 30, 2011 9:56 AM To: Paniagua, Eric Cc: galaxy-dev@lists.bx.psu.edu Dev Subject: Re: [Internal - Galaxy-dev #2159] (New) [galaxy-dev] 2 questions about Galaxy's functional testing support Hello Eric, Submitted by epaniagu@cshl.edu<mailto:epaniagu@cshl.edu> Hi all, I've read the Wiki page on Writing Functional Tests (http://wiki.g2.bx.psu.edu/Admin/Tools/Writing%20Tests) and I've been looking through test/base and test/functional and I am left with two questions: * Is it possible to write a test to validate metadata directly on an (optionally composite) output dataset? I'm sure this is possible, but it would require enhancements to the current functional test framework. Everything described on the above page is file oriented. I see that there is TwillTestCase.check_metadata_for_string, but as far as I can tell this is a bit nonspecific since it appears to just do a text search on the Edit page. This is correct. I don't yet fully understand the context in which tests run, but is there some way to access a "live" dataset's metadata directly, either as a dictionary or just as attributes? Or even to get the actual dataset object? Not with the current functional test framework. Doing this would require enhancements to the framework. * Does the test harness support retaining output files only for failed tests? Ideally with a cap on how much output data to save. If not, would this be difficult to configure? I'm not sure what you mean by "output files" in your question. If you mean output datasets that result from running a functional test for a tool, then I believe there is no difference if the test passed or failed. Thanks, Eric Greg Von Kuster Galaxy Development Team greg@bx.psu.edu<mailto:greg@bx.psu.edu>