Grails Functional Testing Plugin and RESTful Tests - grails

Question

I just grabbed the latest version of the functional testing plugin and it's focus, at least from the docs, has changed a bit. This is not a bad thing. The HtmlUnit integration is nice. But now, there isn't anything in the docs about RESTful testing of web services. However, what I used to do with functionaltestplugin.FunctionalTestCase still works, which is great.
For example:
void testCertifyEmployerCertifierNotFound() {
post('/employerCertification/certifyEmployer') {
headers['Content-Type'] = 'application/json'
body {
"""
{
'employerName': 'ACME',
'certifierExteralId': '1234556',
'certifyingUserId': '123445'
}
"""
}
}
assertStatus 200
assertContentType "application/json"
def model = this.response.contentAsString
def map = JSON.parse(model)
assertFalse(map.success)
assertNotNull(map.errorCode)
assertTrue(map.errorCode == EmployerCertificationService.ERROR_RESPONSE.CERTIFIER_NOT_FOUND.toString())
}
Is this plugin still the "defacto" plugin to use for functional web service testing and is my approach above still valid?

Answer 1

if your target is testing REST request/response I suggest you to use rest client builder plugin. You don't need complex browser-simul plugins. Use it is very simple in just two steps after installing it:
add event to manage functional tests in scripts/_Events.groovy: this is a system grail file used to hook some events at runtime. Just copy and paste this snippet:
eventAllTestsStart = {
if (getBinding().variables.containsKey("functionalTests")) {
functionalTests << "functional"
}
}
Now you can create functional tests in test/functional folder, rememeber to ends filename with Spec, grails will not find any tests if you forget this.
This is an example:
import grails.plugins.rest.client.RestBuilder
import spock.lang.Specification
class AuthenticationSpec extends Specification {
String baseUrl = "http://localhost:8080/grouply-backend"
void "test login wrong credentials"() {
given:
RestBuilder restBuilder = new RestBuilder()
when: "sending wrong credential"
def response = restBuilder.post("${baseUrl}/auth/login") {
json {
username = 'foo'
password = 'bar'
}
}
then: "authentication http error should happen"
response.status == 401
}
}
run tests with $ grails test-app functional:

Answer 2

I have just tried to use both functional testing plugin and webtest plugin with almost-current Grails 2.4.2 and I am sad to report that they are both borked. :(
Functional testing plugin has been practically abandoned for at least 9 months now. On December 2013 a critical bug that makes all of tests written using this plugin not working has been reported. There was no response from plugin developer regarding it up to the day I am writing this. And as this developer, Marc Palmer has switched to iOS development and consultancy in August 2014 I don't believe this bug will ever be resolved.
Webtest plugin has been last updated more than 3 years ago and it "requires Grails 1.2.RC2+". I run into ugly error of missing webtest.jar when running it and it looks like this plugin just haven't been updated to current Grails version. Also its syntax is not very Groovy-like and not nice.
Fortunately Geb integration for Grails plugin is supposed to work with current Grails versions. :) In fact in does only work with Grails 2.3.1+, as of writing these words has been last time updated in June 2014 and it's example tests project have been updated to Grails 2.4.3, release just a few days ago already, so it is very up-to-date. However I haven't used this project yet. Also looking at is's example code I am not sure it the best choice for RESTful API testing - it's more of a GUI web application testing tool..

Answer 3

Although is probably not very "grails style" i guess it should be possible to start up the whole stack with the spring context and run integration rest tests using apache HttpClient.