Testing

Visual Inspection

Since the entire WEB pages use PHP server side includes and PHP functions to a large extent, visual inspection of the pages themselves requires a running WEB server; you cannot check the files locally with a browser in a convenient way. Hence for testing you have two options:

  1. Upload the files to the embsys Server an perform the checks online. In order to avoid disruption of the services delay the linking of your project/sub-pages until all other pages have been cross-checked. Therefore, you need to directly specify the sub-address of your entry page, e.g.:

    http://embsys.technikum-wien.at/projects/ag/index.php

  2. Run a WEB server locally and mask the embsys.technikum-wien.at WEB server temporarily for testing purposes. (Note: Testing using these steps doesn't neccessarily work with an active proxy configuration in your browser!!) The following steps are valid for Ubuntu.

Install apache2 and php5:

sudo apt-get install apache2 php5

Mask the embsys server, therefore, add the following line to /etc/hosts

127.0.0.1       embsys.technikum-wien.at

Obtain all (or at least the relevant: /common, /css, the top-level *.html and *.php files, etc.) pages from the server. The best way to do so is using rsync, see here ...
Next, add your project to the downloaded pages, link them to the local web-server and restart apache. 

rm -rf /var/www
ln -s /path-to-your-downloaded-files /var/www
apache2ctl restart

Start a browser and go to http://embsys.technikum-wien.at ...

Note: Don't forget to comment the line in /etc/hosts before the deployment to the real web-server. For MS Windows you may use the free xampp suite.


Tidy

Use a tool like tidy to fix broken HTML tags and to indent the code. However, use this tool with care (best on a copy of your code)! When invoked with options to modify your code it'll add a header section and body tags to your HTML files - these must be removed afterwards!

tidy -m -i -w 150 test.html

You may use online versions of tidy, see e.g. here or here.

Link Check

Use a link checker to verify whether all your links are correct. The follwoing list directs you to some link-checkers that can be used for this purpose:

linkchecker http://embsys.technikum-wien.at

CSS Validator

Use the CSS Validation Service when you make significant changes to the CSS-sytle sheet.