Testing and Validation

Module 3 focuses on two critical aspects of Holochain development: ensuring data integrity through validation rules and confirming application functionality through testing.

What You’ll Learn

• Validation Rules: How to create rules that verify data meets your requirements
• Deterministic Validation: Understanding validation that must be consistent across the network
• Non-Deterministic Validation: Adding flexible validation like rate limiting or time-based rules
• Test Framework: Using Tryorama and Vitest to test Holochain applications
• Test Scenarios: Creating multi-agent test scenarios that simulate real-world usage

Extending the Blog App

In this module, you’ll continue developing the blog application from Module 2, adding validation rules and comprehensive tests:

• Implementing character limits for posts and comments
• Ensuring only original authors can update content
• Creating rate limiting validation to prevent spam
• Writing tests to verify CRUD operations
• Testing with multiple agents to simulate network interactions

Validation is a cornerstone of Holochain’s integrity, ensuring that even in a distributed network, all data conforms to the rules your application defines. By creating robust validation rules, you ensure that your application’s DHT remains consistent and trustworthy.

Comprehensive testing is equally important, allowing you to verify that your application functions correctly across different scenarios and with multiple users. By the end of this module, you’ll be able to create reliable Holochain applications with integrated validation and testing.