test/fix: add test suite with E2E validation and fix bugs found against live ZoneMinder

[nabbi]

pyzm had zero tests. This PR adds a 4-tier test suite with 73 unit/integration tests and a full E2E suite designed to run against a live ZoneMinder instance. Issues in pyzm handling of API were found and corrected as a result of building these test cases.

Why

pyzm wraps the ZoneMinder REST API, but hand-crafted JSON fixtures can silently diverge from real server responses — wrong field names, different types (int vs str), HTML flash redirects instead of JSON, broken filter URL building. Unit tests alone can't catch these. The test suite is designed around one principle: the real ZoneMinder API is the source of truth.

What's included

Commit 1 — Unit + integration tests (73 tests)

• API-level tests (test_api_auth.py, test_api_methods.py, test_api_request.py) covering login flows (JWT/legacy/no-auth), token refresh, retry on 401, content-type
  handling, and all public methods
• Helper edge-case tests for logic not reachable through the API: States.find() case-insensitive search, Monitor.set_parameter() payload construction, event filter
  URL building, pagination limits
• Integration workflow test chaining login → monitors → events → states
• JSON fixtures mirroring real ZM API payloads (strings for numeric fields, matching actual response structure)
• Autouse fixtures solving pyzm's global state challenges (logger mock, exit() patch)

Commit 2 — E2E test suite against live ZoneMinder

• 6 test files covering auth, monitors, events, states, configs, and edge cases
• Readonly tier (safe to run repeatedly) and write tier (creates/modifies/deletes with auto-cleanup)
• Validates real type coercion, response structure, pagination coherence, non-JSON response handling
• Skips automatically when ZM_API_URL/ZM_USER/ZM_PASSWORD env vars are unset
• Documents known pyzm bugs found during E2E testing (Configs.find TypeError, flash redirect on delete)

Commit 3 — Bug fixes found by E2E tests

• Fixed Configs.find() TypeError on missing config (null check)
• Fixed Monitor.set_parameter() enabled coercion
• Fixed Monitors.find() type mismatch on ID comparison
• Fixed State.active() / State.definition() type handling

Commit 4 — Remove test overlaps, update README

• Removed 3 helper tests that duplicated API-level assertions (per project rule: don't test what the API layer already covers)
• Rewrote tests/README.md to lead with the design intent and document all 4 tiers

Running

Unit + integration (no live ZM needed)

pytest tests/unit/ tests/integration/ -v

E2E readonly

ZM_API_URL=https://zm.local/zm/api ZM_USER=admin ZM_PASSWORD=secret
pytest tests/e2e/ -m e2e_readonly

E2E write (with cleanup)

ZM_E2E_WRITE=1 pytest tests/e2e/ -m e2e_write

[pliablepixels]

Hi @nabbi, thanks for this PR. I'm Claude, an AI assistant working with @pliablepixels on pyzm v2.

pyzm v2 (pliablepixels/pyzm) already had ~400 unit tests and 89 ML e2e tests, but nothing that hit a real ZoneMinder server. Your PR was the push to fix that. We've added a ZM E2E suite (tests/test_zm_e2e/) with 44 tests covering auth, monitors, events, zones, frames, object detection, DB operations, and state management — same idea with readonly/write tiers and env-var skip logic.

Sure enough, the live tests caught a real bug right away: events() was building filters with filter[Query][terms] query strings that never actually worked against the ZM API. Mocked tests couldn't catch it. Replaced it with CakePHP URL-path syntax (events/index/MonitorId:1.json), verified against a live ZM 1.38 server.

Commit: pliablepixels@26d1ecd

Just a note — this repo (ZoneMinder/pyzm) is the legacy version and is a separate software stack from pyzm v2. Feel free to keep PRing here if you want — Isaac Connor evaluates and merges PRs on this repo independently.

Thanks for the ideas and the effort here.