New command line tool for testing DekiScript extensions

With Deki Wiki 1.8.3, we gained the ability to write extensions to DekiScript in XML, as Steve wrote about here and in the the developer wiki article “How do I… Write my first extension in DekiScript?”. But until now testing those extension meant going into the admin console and loading the script and trying it out in a page.

In order to testing easier and to allow some automation of testing for those of us that are creating larger suites of extensions that should be regression tested before being released, we’ve released a utility that can be used both from the command line and programatically to check extension syntax and do test executions of functions.

The tool and some more details about its usage can be found in the developer wiki article “How Do I… Test my DekiScript Extensions?”, but the syntax is really quite simple:

mindtouch.deki.script.exe MyExtension.xml "myextension.SomeFunction()"

This call will load the extension MyExtension.xml, and assuming that the namespace of the extension is myextension, call its function SomeFunction with no arguments. The text, or html, generated by the call is returned to the console. That’s all there is to it.