How to Make a Roundtrip Test

The HDMF test suite has tools for easily doing round-trip tests of container classes. These tools exist in the hdmf.testing module. Round-trip tests exist for the container classes in the hdmf.common module. We recommend you write any additional round-trip tests in the tests/unit/common subdirectory of the Git repository.

For executing your new tests, we recommend using the test.py script in the top of the Git repository. Roundtrip tests will get executed as part of the full test suite, which can be executed with the following command:

$ python test.py

The roundtrip test will generate a new HDMF file with the name test_<CLASS_NAME>.h5 where CLASS_NAME is the class name of the container class you are roundtripping. The test will write an HDMF file with an instance of the container to disk, read this instance back in, and compare it to the instance that was used for writing to disk. Once the test is complete, the HDMF file will be deleted. You can keep the HDMF file around after the test completes by setting the environment variable CLEAN_HDMF to 0, false, False, or FALSE. Setting CLEAN_HDMF to any value not listed here will cause the roundtrip HDMF file to be deleted once the test has completed

Before writing tests, we also suggest you familiarize yourself with the software architecture of HDMF.

H5RoundTripMixin

To write a roundtrip test, you will need to subclass the H5RoundTripMixin class and the TestCase class, in that order, and override some of the instance methods of the H5RoundTripMixin class to test the process of going from in-memory Python object to data stored on disk and back.

setUpContainer

To configure the test for a particular container class, you need to override the setUpContainer method. This method should take no arguments, and return an instance of the container class you are testing.

Here is an example using a CSRMatrix:

from hdmf.common import CSRMatrix
from hdmf.testing import TestCase, H5RoundTripMixin
import numpy as np

class TestCSRMatrixRoundTrip(H5RoundTripMixin, TestCase):

    def setUpContainer(self):
        data = np.array([1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6])
        indices = np.array([0, 2, 2, 0, 1, 2])
        indptr = np.array([0, 2, 3, 6])
        return CSRMatrix(data, indices, indptr, (3, 3))