[Iris]: Creating a custom net serializer, would love to use the "ReplicationSystemTestPlugin" framework to test serialization

Hello!

This is less of a issue and more of a general question for guidance on testing serialization.

Slightly related to this problem: [Content removed]

We’ve had to create a custom net serializer for one of our types, and writing some unit tests would make us feel very secure here. However, setting up a test harness to ensure serialization is correct for just this one net serializer seems like a lot of wasted work considering there is a nice fixture `TTestNetSerializerFixture` which is a part of the “ReplicationSystemTestPlugin”.

I spent some time trying to create an extension plugin which includes this, and moving some header files around in the TestPlugin to allow extracting the framework. But the farther I headed down this path, the harder it seemed to pull off without disturbing a lot of the existing plugin structure.

I’d really like to gain more confidence in our custom net serializer, do you have any advice for how to write an automated test that could do that?

Thanks in advance, Al.

Hi Al,

We have it on our list of things to do before we go beta with iris to make the unit test framework usable for external code as well. What problems did you encounter? Maybe there are some simple changes we can incorporate quickly in order to allow you to use the testframework from another program/plugin. Please share what files/features you wanted to access and we can try to restructure things a bit.

Best regards

Mattias

If you have access to p4, it should be possible to use the automation test framework that is used by the the tests in //UE5/Main/EngineTest/Source/EngineTest/Networking. A little bit more involved, but it should be possible to exercise properties using your custom NetSerializer that way.