Add TEST_PROPERTIES keyword in ecbuild_add_test

[tweska]

While updating tests in MultIO, I found that the PROPERTIES keyword could not be used in ecbuild_add_test.

[FussyDuck]

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[wdeconinck]

Hi @tweska welcome to the ecbuild developers team! Great to see contributions.
In short, I have a suggestion to add a new keyword TEST_PROPERTIES instead for this.

The reasoning:

ecbuild_add_test first makes an executable TARGET and then a test invoking that TARGET.
the PROPERTIES to be added to the TARGET is therefore also an acceptable code path, and is not a bug to be fixed.

To add test properties I always did an a posteriori command myself to e.g. add LABELS:

ecbuild_add_test(TARGET <test>)
if (TEST <test>)
  set_tests_properties(<test> PROPERTIES LABELS <labels>)
endif()

I feel that for the very advanced cases that are used in multio to add fixtures etc. it would be OK to use the approach of using set_tests_properties afterwards as shown above?

Note further that there are two other keywords: DEPENDS and TEST_DEPENDS.
DEPENDS is for dependencies between targets for compilation, and TEST_DEPENDS is for dependencies between tests, setting the order of test execution.
We could add the same approach with a new keyword TEST_PROPERTIES for the TEST properties and PROPERTIES could remain for the TARGET. That should then not be a breaking change.

As a side note:
For the more common LABELS case which I am often using I was considering just adding the TEST_LABELS (or just LABELS) keyword to ecbuild_add_test instead, rather than start using "TEST_PROPERTIES LABELS " if it becomes available.
Same way you can set the target's LINKER_LANGUAGE directly without using "PROPERTIES" on the target. We cannot aim to do this for all possible properties of course.

[tweska]

Hi @wdeconinck, I added the TEST_PROPERTIES keyword, as you suggested.

[wdeconinck]

I noticed the LABELS keyword is already there. I should start using it and rtfm :)

[wdeconinck]

Nice, could you add a test for this property as well?