[development] Simpletest Conundrum

In Drupal 7, I have a requirement to simpletest a functional group of methods... one test comprised of about 1800 subtest permutations. The issue I have is that these are back-end functions with no UI interaction, yet simpletest unit test, from what I read, does not provide the functionality for accessing the db, creating test tables and data, etc. Do I fudge it by having a menu callback, or by having an admin page with a button if necessary, so that I can webtest, or do I manually include db.inc, etc. so that I can access the db, (though I think it would need to be much dirtier than that)? Jeff -- --- drupal.org/user/367108 linkedin.com/in/jeffrgreenberg accidentalcoder.com / ayendesigns.com @accidentalcoder