Is there a best or preferred workflow for complex OpenStudio Ruby script development including interactive debugging and execution tracing?

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A number of the folks on the development team use RubyMine for editing and development. Depending upon the type of measure you're writing, it may be easiest to use the "Apply Measures Now" feature in the OpenStudio Application to quickly apply your code to a simple model. You'll get the standard reporting from the measure as it's running on your model, and you can visually inspect what it did right there in the application. If it's a reporting measure or something designed to run as part of a complex workflow, that's probably easiest to run at the command line. David, Andrew, or one of the other developers will probably chime in with tips on how they develop measures.

I've been playing around with RubyMine for some time now to write and test an EnergyPlus measure. I ran into some problems, hopefully my findings can help some other users.

The MiniTest that came with ruby in Openstudio gave me some errors, I was able to fix by inheriting from MiniTest::Unit::TestCase, i.e.:

class TestMeasure_Test < MiniTest::Unit::TestCase
#class TestMeasure_Test < MiniTest::Test # wrong

Every run needs to have the -I option supplied, I got tired of this and fixed by adding an absolute path in the require:

require 'C:\Program Files (x86)\OpenStudio 1.5.0\Ruby\openstudio'
require 'C:\Program Files (x86)\OpenStudio 1.5.0\Ruby\openstudio\ruleset\ShowRunnerOutput'

In an effort to debug the code, I couldn't find anything working. At least not in combination with MiniTest, and minitest/debugger kept failing in every way. I decided to write plain Ruby code without the minitest to see if my measure works for my EnergyPlus measure. This is all based on samples provided above and in the documentation. I left some lines commented out in case someone wants to convert it back to an OpenStudio measure. Not clean code, but it might help some people out.

require 'C:\Program Files (x86)\OpenStudio 1.5.0\Ruby\openstudio'
require 'C:\Program Files (x86)\OpenStudio 1.5.0\Ruby\openstudio\ruleset\ShowRunnerOutput'
require_relative '../measure.rb'

# Input parameters
osmfile = "file.osm"

# create an instance of the measure
measure = TestMeasure.new

path = OpenStudio::Path.new(File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/" + osmfile)
# load the test model
# translator = OpenStudio::OSVersion::VersionTranslator.new
#model = translator.loadModel(path)
#if model.empty?
#  raise("Model not loaded correctly")
#end
#model = model.get

# load the workspace, for EnergyPlus measure
workspace = OpenStudio::Workspace::load(path,"EnergyPlus".to_IddFileType)
raise "Unable to load OpenStudio Workspace from '" + input_path.to_s + "'." if workspace.empty?
workspace = workspace.get

# Get arguments and set to valid values
arguments = measure.arguments(workspace)
argument_map = OpenStudio::Ruleset.convertOSArgumentVectorToMap(arguments)
# Set valid value
zone_name = arguments[0].clone
zone_name.setValue("New Zone")
argument_map["zone_name"] = zone_name

# create an instance of a runner
runner = OpenStudio::Ruleset::OSRunner.new

# run the measure
# measure.run(model, runner, argument_map)
measure.run(workspace, runner, argument_map)
result = runner.result
show_output(result)
#assert(result.value.valueName == "Success")

#save the model
output_dir = File.expand_path('output', File.dirname(__FILE__))
#FileUtils.mkdir output_dir unless Dir.exist? output_dir
#output_file_path = OpenStudio::Path.new("#{output_dir}/test_imported_idf_model_results.osm")
#model.save(output_file_path,true)
output_file_path = OpenStudio::Path.new("#{output_dir}/output")
workspace.save(output_file_path,true)