341527 - Test case aliases are globally unique

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Testopia :: Test Cases, defect)

Description

[Nat Budin]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4

I was the original requester of the test case aliases feature.  When I requested it, I envisioned it as a way for automated test scripts to mechanistically report their results back to Testopia without having to know the (possibly ephemeral) ID of the test case being run.

The way things are currently implemented, test cases have string aliases (good), but those string aliases are _globally_ unique, as opposed to being unique within the test plan.

Suppose, for example, I have an automated test script that runs 5 test cases against, let's say, Firefox.  I have aliases for all my test cases in Testopia, and my script uses those aliases to report its results.  The cases' aliases are:

* open-firefox
* go-to-url
* open-new-tab
* bookmark-current-page
* jump-to-bookmark

I'm using my test script and everything is working fine.  Then Mozilla releases Firefox version 2.0.  I'd like to test that too, and maybe I want to add some test cases for the new features they added.  So I'd like to make a copy of my test plan, and - this is important - I need to keep the aliases the same as they were in the old test plan, so I don't have to go change every alias in my test script every time upstream releases a new version.  This is much more important for real-world cases where you might have 150 test cases in an automated test suite (and yes, I do).

I understand there may be an issue with test cases that are linked into a test plan (what happens if they have the same alias as a test case that is already in the test plan?).  Personally, I'd be fine with Testopia just throwing an error message and refusing to link in the test case that has a duplicate alias.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
This is less a bug and more a design issue, so reproduction doesn't exactly apply here.

Actual Results:  
See above.

Expected Results:  
Ditto.

Novell employees (sorry, others, I haven't got permission to release nrmxplan yet) can take a look at http://harvey.boston.ximian.com/mediawiki/index.php/Nrmxplan and http://harvey.boston.ximian.com/nrmxplan (username: test, password: test) for my test case database implementation that supports this feature as I would like it to be done.

Comment 1

[Greg Hendricks]

Solution here is to include product information in the alias name. SO for example:   
 
  Testopia_2.0_TestCase.get_with_params.