[Product-Developers] How to deal with different url structure in testbrowser? (no VirtualHostBase)

[René Pijlman]

I'm developing a product for Plone 3.3 that transforms url's in the view 
of my content type, following Martin's book (which is now the most worn 
out book on my shelf :-). The unit tests work fine, but a functional 
test in zope.testbrowser failed. It turns out this is caused by the 
url's of pages in the testbrowser.

The test begins with the ususal:

     >>> from Products.Five.testbrowser import Browser
     >>> browser = Browser()
     >>> portal_url = self.portal.absolute_url()

Then it opens portal_url, adds folder 'ham', opens that folder and adds 
a page 'spam'. In the test runner (bin/instance test -s my.package) this 
results in the url:

     (Pdb) print browser.url
     http://nohost/plone/ham/spam
                  ^^^^^^

When the site is accessed through Apache and VirtualHostBase, the same 
page would have the url:

     http://myhost/ham/spam

The difference is the extra '/plone' in the test runner, for the plone 
site object in Zope's root. This causes my test for a root-relative link 
to fail:

     >>> '<a href="/eggs">' in browser.contents
     True

... since in the test runner that link has become:

     (Pdb) print browser.contents[15650:15670]
         <a href="/plone/eggs">

Is there a way to have the test runner use VirtualHostBase, and get urls 
that are the same as with interactive use through Apache and 
VirtualHostBase?

Or is the custom solution to write the tests as if using Zope directly, 
without Apache and VirtualHostBase?

-- 
René
http://www.applinet.nl