[Development] date/time adjust for (auto) testing

[André Somers]

Hi,

We have applications that use the current date and time at places spread 
around the code. For normal operations, that works very nicely. However, 
we find that for (auto) testing, it would be very convenient if we could 
trick the application into believing it is some other date/time, so that 
we can test if certain behaviours work the way we would like to 
automatically. Currently, these tests take a lot of time because we 
actually need to manually adjust the system date and time, do some 
stuff, then adjust again, etc.

It would be really confortable if there was some control to set a 
date/time offset (so the time keeps running) or a fixed date/time to be 
returned from currentDate(), currentTime() or currentDateTime() 
respectively. I guess access to such a thing does not belong in the main 
Qt classes, but is really a testing tool, so perhaps it could find 
refuge in QtTest somewhere. Would a contribution adding such a thing 
stand any chance of being accepted, or would this be considered out of 
scope or even unwanted?

An alternative might be to hook the windows kernel API, but that may be 
much tricker to get right and may have unforseen consequences for the 
code injected by Squish doing the actual testing.

André

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