Add automated tests

[michaelneu]

[ghost]

Do you have any preferences about what kind of testing patterns and paradigms to use? I could set up some REST API tests using Postman.

[michaelneu]

I was more thinking of unit tests on a CI provider, but I'm not sure how to get this. There are some Excel tools, which can run tests inside Excel, but I have to yet find a CI provider with Office preinstalled. My main wish is to run these tests automatically when code is pushed to the repo, plus we'd get a "build passing" badge 😄

I've checked Travis, AppVeyor and CircleCI in the past, but I couldn't get a project running there. Do you know of any alternatives? Having a custom CI runner (like on GitLab) on a VM with Office preinstalled would work, but I'm not really sure whether that's the easiest solution.

[ghost]

Sadly I don't know anything about getting badges on a GitHub repo. My thought was to have a git pre-commit hook that starts the server, tests http responses, closes the server. It could help a little? I already have a set of tests that had helped me find the bug with lookups by id, which you've merged (thanks!)

[michaelneu]

If you’re interested in doing the pre-commit setup and want to kill some time, feel free to build something very simplistic. But please don’t spend too much time on it, as we might build something CI-based in the future and possibly revert that hook then.

You might also want take a look into how traditional CI works instead, because that’s somewhat common practice in open source (e.g. set up a „learning-project“ in a language of your choice on Travis CI, their docs are really good and it’s free for open source), and you might find a solution.

In the long run, IMHO it'd be better to have it on a neutral CI provider, so we could provide automated builds as well, but that will take some further research. I'll check out Azure DevOps some time, maybe there exists a machine with Office. People must need to test their Add-Ins somewhere...