New features in the upcoming FitNesse release

Andrew Dassing and Dean Wampler posted a few e-mails to the FitNesse mailing list recently hinting at what will be the new features in the upcoming FitNesse release. According to Dean’s e-mail, we can expect a new release in the next couple of weeks. Some of the changes will make it much easier to edit and manage complex test pages, and there are quite a few shortcuts to make page editing more efficient. Here are the changes that I found the most interesting:

• More flexible symbolic links: absolute or relative, going to subpages or parent pages.
• Support for hotkeys for some operations like creating (alt+c) or saving a page (alt+s).
• Pages with names that end in “Test” are by default marked with the Test property; Pages with names ending in “Suite” are test suites by default.
• Quick-edit links for included pages, SetUp and TearDown that return to the main page after editing has finished
• Page editor opens automatically when the user browses to a non-existent page
• Table of contents tweaks:
  • we can now assign a textual description to sub-pages and sub-wikis. by default they appear on mouse-over tool-tips, but option -h displays tool-tip text next to the links in the table of contents.
  • option -g splits words in wiki name to make table of contents more human readable.
  • option -p show some basic page properties next to the link as well, so make it easier to differentiate tests and suites from plain text pages.
  • option -Rnumber limits the number of levels for recursive display
• Variables are scoped to the included page
• relative child links are preserved in included pages
• new variables ${PAGE_NAME} and ${PAGE_PATH} automatically resolve to the current page name and full path, to help with knowing the context while scripting pages.
• Utility sections can now be completely hidden from the page with the “invisible” collapsible section !*<
• !{= =} syntax will pre-process arithmetic expressions on variables

Two important tweaks apply only to the Java test runner:

• Symbol cell handlers like in .NET and Python (<< and >>) — still in progress.
• Regular expression support for ColumnFixture and RowFixture cells

What is still notably missing, and was announced quite some time ago, is the support for SVN check-in/checkout directly from FitNesse. In any case, the changes look very interesting and I look forward to playing with this release when it is finally available.

Image credits: Craig Jewell.