Types of Integrity Tests

A single-project integrity test confirms that reports and documents from a project execute to completion, without errors. This is useful when changes have been made somewhere in the system, and you want to ensure that none of the changes cause execution errors in your reports or documents.

In a single-project test, Integrity Manager executes the specified reports and documents. It then displays a list of the reports along with whether the execution of each report or document succeeded or failed. If a report or document failed, you can double-click on the report name in the results list to see what error message was generated.

In addition to the single-project integrity test, Integrity Manager supports these types of comparative integrity tests:

• Project-versus-project integrity tests compare reports and/or documents from two different projects. This is useful when you are moving a project from one environment to another (for instance, out of development and into production), and you want to ensure that the migration does not cause changes in any reports or documents in the project.
• Baseline-versus-project integrity tests compare reports and/or documents from a project against a previously established baseline. The baseline can be established by running a single-project integrity test, or taken from a previous execution of a project-versus-project integrity test.

  Baseline-versus-project tests can be used as an alternative to project-versus-project tests when no base project is available, or when running against a production Intelligence Server would be too costly in terms of system resources. Also, by using baseline-versus-project tests a user can manually change the results which they want to compare the target project with.

• Baseline-versus-baseline integrity tests compare reports and/or documents from two previously established baselines against each other. These baselines can be established by running single-project integrity tests (see below), or taken from a previous execution of a project-versus-project integrity test.

  These tests can be useful if you have existing baselines from previous tests that you want to compare. For example, your system is configured in the recommended project life cycle of development > test > production (for more information on this life cycle, see the Managing your projects section in the System Administration Help). You have an existing baseline from a single project test of the production project, and the results of a project versus project test on the development and test projects. In this situation, you can use a baseline versus baseline test to compare the production project to the test project

In each of these comparative tests, Integrity Manager executes the specified reports and documents in both the baseline and the target. You can compare the report data, generated SQL code, graphs, Excel exports, and PDF output for the tested reports; you can compare the Excel exports and PDF output for tested documents, or test the execution of the documents without exporting the output. Integrity Manager informs you which reports and documents are different between the two projects, and highlights in red the differences between them.