Provide a scalable way to ensure a clean testing environment for SimpleTest

Edit: mispost.

The issue is related to having a module, or any configuration, made in the development environment that SimpleTest is running in that bleeds over to the tests.

Thus your issue fits in that category, and should be used to evaluate any solutions proposed in this issue.

Clearer explanation from, http://drupal.org/node/346844#comment-1258161.

The issue of bleed-over is rather complex and results from the hard-coded statics within Drupal. Many of these statics are reset manually, but there is no clean way to reset them all.

Functions in the following format create this issue.

function get_something($reset = FALSE) {
  static $static;

  if (!isset($static) || $reset) {
    $static = // Do something once.
  }
  return $static;
}

Many of these functions are never directly called by anything other than the system and thus are hard to find and reset in a clean way, other than calling them all with $reset = TRUE.

A revamp of API or some sort of registry with all these functions is needed so they can be cleared cleanly.

Thought about this for a few days and the only real workable solution I can come up with is to have a static storage facility. Something like the following.

function static_get($name);

function static_set($name, $value);

function static_delete($name);

function static_delete_all();

Either use true statics inside some function and store an array with $name as the key, similar to variables only not stored in db, or just us a global variable like $GLOBALS['STATICS'] for simplicity of API functions (my preference).

A re-write of the function above would like something like the following.

function get_something($reset = FALSE) {
  $static = static_get('static');

  if (!isset($static) || $reset) {
    $static = static_set('static', /* Do something once. */);
  }
  return $static;
}

Might almost make sense to eliminate the $reset parameter on individual functions since it can also be accomplished with static_delete('static'). Which is nice as those parameters are rather useless, seems cleaner.

That way we should be able to reset all statics, core and contrib, by calling static_delete_call()! Which solves the majority, if not all the problems plaguing SimpleTest.

I would be happy to write and implement this in core, just would like opinions/approvals.

Initial stab at $GLOBALS implementation.

Related to #254491: Standardize static caching ?

Wait for #254491: Standardize static caching

The static cache stuff made it in, not sure we should both implementing this as #323477: Increase simpletest speed by running on a simplified profile should alleviate the issue.

#481498: Update simpletest module to use drupal_static()

Actually I believe your right. I will be working on a much better test runner after #449198: SimpleTest: Clean up test loading and related API gets in which should remove some if not all others.

Solved the static issue with drupal_static() although other issues exists they are no where near as important.