Impossible to use `t.try` in before hook

[tymfear]

Please provide details about:

• What you're trying to do
  Use t.try in the test.before hook

• What happened
  The following error is thrown:

  TypeError {
    message: 'test.registerUniqueTitle is not a function',
  }

• What you expected to happen
  No error are thrown

Please share relevant sample code. Or better yet, provide a link to a minimal reproducible example.

import anyTest, { ExecutionContext, TestInterface } from 'ava';
const test: TestInterface = anyTest as TestInterface;

test.before(async (t: ExecutionContext) => {
  const res = await t.try((tt: ExecutionContext) => tt.is(1, 1))

  res.commit();
})

test('test', async (t: ExecutionContext) => t.pass());

We'll also need your AVA configuration (in package.json or ava.config.* configuration files) and how you're invoking AVA. Share the installed AVA version (get it by running npx ava --version).
AVA version: 3.8.2

Config:

export default function factory() {
  return {
    require: ['ts-node/register', 'tsconfig-paths/register'],
    files: ['spec/**/*'],
    cache: true,
    failWithoutAssertions: true,
    verbose: true,
    extensions: ['ts'],
    concurrency: process.env.AVA_CONCURRENCY || 10,
    timeout: '90s',
  };
}

AVA is invoked with npx ava path/to/file command. Also reproducible with IDEA Node configuration

[novemberborn]

Good find @tymfear!

Looking at the code, we don't enforce unique titles for hooks. Which means that we shouldn't allow them to use snapshots either, so that's a bit of an oversight.

Enforcing unique titles for before and after hooks isn't as straight-forward as it sounds. I'm tempted to explicitly fail these assertions in all hooks going forward (though this would be a breaking change when it comes to snapshots). What would you think of that? What setup / teardown problems are you running into that require t.try()?

[tymfear]

@novemberborn I was just using it to check if my preconditions are fulfilled and I can go on with tests. It was part of the retry mechanism. I was using the deepEqual, but replaced it with lodash and plain error throwing, so not a big deal.

Probably, another parameter could be added to the t.try hook, that will allow configuring unique title, and that would allow hook usage anywhere without breaking changes?

[novemberborn]

Probably, another parameter could be added to the t.try hook, that will allow configuring unique title, and that would allow hook usage anywhere without breaking changes?

You can already provide the title. Really what it comes down to is that snapshots require unique titles, and we're not enforcing title uniqueness for hooks.

I'm just not sure that we should, which means we should be explicitly failing snapshot and try assertions.

[novemberborn]

I'm just not sure that we should, which means we should be explicitly failing snapshot and try assertions.

See #2523.