=======  ================
SEP      17
Title    Spider Contracts
Author   Insophia Team
Created  2010-06-10
Status   Draft
=======  ================

=========================
SEP-017: Spider Contracts
=========================

The motivation for Spider Contracts is to build a lightweight mechanism for
testing your spiders, and be able to run the tests quickly without having to
wait for all the spider to run. It's partially based on the
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_contract Design by contract]  approach
(hence its name) where you define certain conditions that spider callbacks must
met, and you give example testing pages.

How it works
============

In the docstring of your spider callbacks, you write certain tags that define
the spider contract. For example, the URL of a sample page for that callback,
and what you expect to scrape from it.

Then you can run a command to check that the spider contracts are met.

Contract examples
=================

gExample URL for simple callback
--------------------------------

The ``parse_product`` callback must return items containing the fields given in
``@scrapes``.

::

   #!python
   class ProductSpider(BaseSpider):

       def parse_product(self, response):
           """
           @url http://www.example.com/store/product.php?id=123
           @scrapes name, price, description
           """"

gChained callbacks
------------------

The following spider contains two callbacks, one for login to a site, and the
other for scraping user profile info.

The contracts assert that the first callback returns a Request and the second
one scrape ``user, name, email`` fields.

::

   #!python
   class UserProfileSpider(BaseSpider):

       def parse_login_page(self, response):
           """
           @url http://www.example.com/login.php
           @returns_request
           """
           # returns Request with callback=self.parse_profile_page

       def parse_profile_page(self, response):
           """
           @after parse_login_page
           @scrapes user, name, email
           """"
           # ...

Tags reference
==============

Note that tags can also be extended by users, meaning that you can have your
own custom contract tags in your Scrapy project.

==================== ==========================================================
``@url``             url of a sample page parsed by the callback
``@after``           the callback is called with the response generated by the
                     specified callback
``@scrapes``         list of fields that must be present in the item(s) scraped
                     by the callback
``@returns_request`` the callback must return one (and only one) Request
==================== ==========================================================

Some tag constraints:

 * a callback cannot contain ``@url`` and ``@after``

Checking spider contracts
=========================

To check the contracts of a single spider:

::

   scrapy-ctl.py check example.com

Or to check all spiders:

::

   scrapy-ctl.py check

No need to wait for the whole spider to run.
