Testing JSON stuff

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi,

I have some code in a controller that receives JSON requests in this sort of format:

http://www.json.org/JSONRequest.html

However, I am not finding a way to test that, since:

1) post() seems to insist on sending key-value pairs.

2) I'm not sure what to post to trigger the format.js in respond_to

Any suggestions?

Thankyou, Dave

2

First of all, json is usually only sent to javascript apps on web browsers do to lack of standard xml support. Maybe you should consider sending xml to your rails app.

Secondly, I think you mean something like this:

respond_to do |format|        format.xml { render :xml => @your_object.to_xml }        format.json { render :json => @your_object.to_json }        format.yaml { render :yaml => @your_object.to_yaml }      end

3

First of all, json is usually only sent to javascript apps on web browsers do to lack of standard xml support. Maybe you should consider sending xml to your rails app.

Hi, thanks - it's not a bad idea, but we need to handle json in our rails app, and I want to be able to test it, of course.

Secondly, I think you mean something like this:

respond_to do |format|        format.xml { render :xml => @your_object.to_xml }        format.json { render :json => @your_object.to_json }

Oops, of course. Doesn't fix the problem though, I still get a test failure when doing:

    post(:create, {'foo' => 'bar'}, {"Content-Type" => "application/ json"})     assert_equal @response.body, "{good: \"ok\"}"

against

      format.json {         ok = { :good => 'ok' }         render :json => ok.to_json       }

       format.yaml { render :yaml => @your_object.to_yaml }      end

Thanks, Dave

4

Progress... sort of. But I'm even more suspicious of this testing framework now:

    post(:create, {:q => 'foo'}, {"Content-Type" => "application/ json"})     assert_equal "{good: \"ok\"}", @response.body

However, in the controller, I have:

    logger.warn "INFO: " + request.env.inspect     logger.warn "HEADERS: " + headers.inspect

And I get:

INFO: {"REMOTE_ADDR"=>"0.0.0.0", "REQUEST_URI"=>"/resource/create? q=foo", "SERVER_PORT"=>80, "REQUEST_METHOD"=>"POST"} HEADERS: {"cookie"=>, "Cache-Control"=>"no-cache"}

1) The URI should not include q=foo - those should be passed as part of the POST, no?

2) What the heck happened to my Content-Type header?!

This isn't making much sense at all.

Thanks, Dave

5

Ok... I think I figured it out. The problem is that I needed an integration test, not a functional test. The way the two work seems to be subtly different. This works ok:

  def test_create     open_session do |sess|       sess.post('/resource/create.js', '{answer: 42}', {"Content-type" => "application/json"})       assert_equal "{answerplusone: 43}", sess.response.body     end   end

With this:

  def create     respond_to do |format|       format.html {         render :text => 'hello world'       }       format.js {         ok = { :good => 'ok' }         render :json => ok.to_json       }     end   end

Well... at least in the sense of sending the right stuff and getting the right section of code back.