Change names of tests created by nose test generators

Question

Nose has a bug - test names created by generators are not cached, so the error looks like it happened in the last test, not the actual test where it failed. I got around it following the solution in the bug report discussion, but it only works for names shown on stdout, not in the XML report (--with-xunit)

from functools import partial, update_wrapper
def testGenerator():
    for i in range(10):
        func = partial(test)
        # make decorator with_setup() work again
        update_wrapper(func, test)
        func.description = "nice test name %s" % i
        yield func

def test():
    pass

The output of nose is as expected, something like

nice test name 0 ... ok
nice test name 1 ... ok
nice test name 2 ... ok
...

But the test names in XML are just 'testGenerator'.

...<testcase classname="example" name="testGenerator" time="0.000" />...

How can I change this so that the personalized test names are shown on both stdout and XML output?

I'm using nosetests version 1.1.2 and Python 2.6.6

Answer 1

You can change the way that Nose names tests by adding a plugin that implements describeTest

from nose.plugins import Plugin
class CustomName(Plugin):
    "Change the printed description/name of the test."
    def describeTest(self, test):
         return "%s:%s" % (test.test.__module__, test.test.description)

You will then have to install this plugin, and enable it in the Nose invocation.

Answer 2

You can add the following line.

testGenerator.__name__ = "nice test name %s" % i

Example:

from functools import partial, update_wrapper
def testGenerator():
    for i in range(10):
        func = partial(test)
        # make decorator with_setup() work again
        update_wrapper(func, test)
        func.description = "nice test name %s" % i
        testGenerator.__name__ = "nice test name %s" % i
        yield func

def test():
    pass

This will result in the names you want.

<testsuite name="nosetests" tests="11" errors="0" failures="0" skip="0"><testcase classname="sample" name="nice test name 0" time="0.000" />