Fast follows for Unit Testing

[matthewshaver]

What are you changing in this pull request and why?

Fast follows for unit tests:

• Breaks the reference page into sections in a folder.
• Adds resource links to the /docs page on unit tests.
• The Methods page is updated to reflect unit tests.
• Links to information about the --empty flag.
• Various other edits and clean ups.

Checklist

• Review the Content style guide so my content adheres to these guidelines.
• For docs versioning, review how to version a whole page and version a block of content.
• Add a checklist item for anything that needs to happen before this PR is merged, such as "needs technical review" or "change base branch."

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Name	Status	Preview	Comments	Updated (UTC)
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[graciegoheen]

This feels very similar to / duplicative of this section that we already have on the reference page. Can we combine or separate into its own page and link to it instead?

[matthewshaver]

@graciegoheen What would be your preference? The fast follow note I have is to add data formats to this page but I can do it as a separate page. A few questions

A sentence with a link is much easier to miss than an entire section of the document (maybe important because this is a new feature in beta). Is that going to hinder the beta for users?
There are only 2 formats supported right now, so it wouldn't be a meaty page at the moment. Is the intent to have this page linked to in other portions of the docs outside of unit testing?

I can create it as a snippet as well, make it reusable without creating a new page for it. Let me know your thoughts.

[graciegoheen]

We already have this link:

but we could specifically tag that to the existing format section.

The reference doc section for unit testing only has a single section:

Whereas the section for data tests has many:

If we have a separate page for something as simple as limit for data testing, I don't see why we wouldn't follow a similar pattern for unit tests?

I mainly just want to avoid maintaining duplicative versions of this documentation - since we already have this "format" section on the reference page:

so a snippet could totally work as well!

@runleonarun do you have thoughts here?

[runleonarun]

@graciegoheen and @matthewshaver
I think it would be useful to have formats be its own page under "For unit tests" because both About unit tests property and Unit tests pages are already quite long.

If we did that, we could make this tweak to the Before you Begin in the About Unit Testing page to look something like this:

Before you Begin

• We currently only support unit testing SQL models.
• We currently only support adding unit tests to models in your current project.
• If your model has multiple versions, by default the unit test will run on all versions of your model. Read unit testing versioned models for more information.
• We support dict and csv formats in unit testing. Read more about formatting unit tests in Formats.

This does make me wonder if we should do the same for versions and input? Otherwise it might be awkward. The input section could have more fleshed out examples like in other sections.

[graciegoheen]

I would be in favor of doing the same for versions, inputs, and overrides! Thanks @runleonarun

[graciegoheen]

Do there pages feel duplicative?

• https://docs-getdbt-com-git-unit-testing-ff-dbt-labs.vercel.app/reference/resource-properties/unit-testing-versions
• https://docs-getdbt-com-git-unit-testing-ff-dbt-labs.vercel.app/docs/build/unit-tests#unit-testing-versioned-models

[runleonarun]

Just a few suggestions. I know it's close to the release but I feel like we can clarify these things in unit testing to help beta users.

[runleonarun]

@matthewshaver we chatted about adding a heading to the file above. Something like
## File structure

@graciegoheen would this make sense for all files that lay out the configs or properties and their options like we do above?

[runleonarun]

This looks good! We can follow up with any other requests