Soaspec

This gem helps to represent multiple API tests against a backend briefly, concisely and clearly.

Soaspec example

Example showing how a REST 'get' call can be made and it's response extracted.

Build Status Coverage

It is essentially a wrapper around the Savon and RestClient gems, adding useful functionality including

  • Creating multiple API calls from the same base configuration through the use of an ExchangeHandler class
  • Extracting values from response body's through either XPath or JSONPath
  • Building up a custom RSpec success scenario shared example to reuse common tests on an API
  • Methods simplifying setting and extracting values from a Request/Response pair (Exchange)
  • Waiting for a particular response from an API by polling it
  • Representing paths to values from a response with business-meaningful method names
  • Generating initial code for testing an API with soaspec new
  • Accessing and utilising oauth2 access tokens
  • Hosting a virtual_server that simulates REST & SOAP responses from an API

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'soaspec'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install soaspec

Things to be done

Getting Started

Git book

A book is in progress that will walk through creating an API test in Ruby and how you can manage different variations of API tests in Soaspec. You can see the draft here

Create a new test suite using RSpec

To create a new test suite using gem you can use the soaspec binary/executable.

Example:

mkdir 'api_test'
cd 'api_test'
soaspec new [rest/soap]
bundle install

This creates some RSpec tests for a sample SOAP/REST service. It creates tests that can be run through the spec Rake task. To understand what the tests are doing, please read the usage section.

rake spec

Create an ExchangeHandler representing an API

To create a new handler from the command line use soaspec add. E.g to generate handler for MyApi

soaspec add rest MyApi

soaspec generate can be used to help generate an exchange handler. This will open a browser from which you can enter parameters and have an ExchangeHandler generated with the parameters entered.

Generate test suite from a WSDL

A test suite can also be generated using a WSDL if a --wsdl option is passed to the soaspec generate command. This is still in trial period and will be finished probably after Savon 3 is more stable as it can make use of its generation of a sample request.

Usage

  • SOAP - this uses Savon behind the scenes. Some defaults are overridden. Please see 'soap_handler.rb'-'default_options' method for such defaults. When describing an API override this in 'savon_options' method
  • REST - this uses the resource class from the Rest-Client gem behind the scenes.

See spec and features for example of usage.

ExchangeHandler

To start with, create a class inheriting from a ‘Handler’ class for each web service that needs testing. In this class you define the common parameters used for testing it.

For example:

# Classes are set up through inheriting from either `Soaspec::RestHandler` or `Soaspec::SoapHandler`
class PuppyService < Soaspec::RestHandler
  # Set default headers for all `Exchanges` using this class
  headers accept: 'application/json', content_type: 'application/json'

  # URL for which all requests using this class will start with
  base_url 'http://petstore.swagger.io/v2/pet'

  # Accessing parts of a response

  # Define a method 'id' that can be obtained with either XPATH '//id' or JSONPath '$..id'
  element :id, :id
  # Define method to obtain a category id through JSON Path
  element :category_id, '$..category.id'
end

You can easily create a exchange handler with the soaspec add command. This will also add comments explaining common methods that can be used

Exchange

After creating the ExchangeHandler, you reference this class in creating Exchanges (objects that each represent a request / response pair). Upon initialization of the Exchange object (or later on through setters), parameters specific to this request are set. Most getters of the Exchange are on the response & will implicitly trigger the API request to be made. Once this request has been made, all following accessors of the response will just use the response of the previous request made.

For example, to create a http post using the above ExchangeHandler and get parts of it's response.

# Create a new Exchange that will post to 'http://petstore.swagger.io/v2/pet' with JSON { "status": "sold" }
# The 'body' key will convert it's value from a Hash to JSON
exchange = PuppyService.post(body: { status: 'sold' })

# This will trigger the request to be made & return the response, in this case a RestClient::Response object
response = exchange.response
# This will reuse the response already received return a value at JSON path $..category.id, throwing an exception if not found
exchange.category_id
# This will do the same but using path directly in code
exchange['$..category.id']
# Get the HTTP status code of the response
exchange.status_code

See Request Body Parameters for more details on setting a request body. See Creating an Exchange for details on how to create an Exchange.

Virtual Server

Soaspec includes a virtual server that returns REST and SOAP responses that can be used when learning or experimenting with API testing. The gem itself uses this to test it's own functionality.

To start the server, after installing the gem, type

soaspec virtual_server [port_num]

By default it runs on port 4999. This will be used if port_num is empty.

You can look at the documentation for the web services provided at the rool url (e.g localhost:4999).

RSpec

For example:

context PuppyService.new('Order Puppies') do
  describe post(:create_pet, body: { status: 'sold' }) do # Post with status as sold in request
    its(['status']) { is_expected.to eq 'sold' } # Check responses status is sold
  end
end

Tips

If you find having a large backtrace on errors or RSpec shared examples such as 'success scenarios' this can shorten the backtrace.

RSpec.configure do |config|

config.backtrace_exclusion_patterns = [ /rspec/ ] end

Cucumber

If you're using Cucumber for testing a single API call then I would recommend the following

In the Given (or background) specify the Exchange object. Either store this as an instance variable (e.g @exchange) or use the global Soaspec.last_exchange (which is automatically set).

In the When, use the call method to make the request @exchange.call. If problems occur in making the request this should separate such failures from issues with the response.

In the Then, make the assertions from the @exchange object. E.g

expect(@exchange['message']).to include 'success'
expect(@exchange.status_code).to eq 200

Authentication

See the wiki for details.

Logging

By default traffic is logged to a file in the logs folder called traffic_DATETIME.log.

The SpecLogger class is responsible for handling all the logs.

To change the output file location to 'custom.log':

Soaspec::SpecLogger.traffic_file = 'custom.log'

To change the folder the default log is:

Soaspec::SpecLogger.traffic_folder = 'custom_folder'

To disable logging to a file set the 'output_to_file' to 'false'.

Soaspec::SpecLogger.output_to_file = false

There is a similar parameter to logging to the terminal, STDOUT (by default false). You can also change the color of this output with the terminal_color attribute.

Soaspec::SpecLogger.output_to_terminal = true
Soaspec::SpecLogger.terminal_color = :magenta

Learning more

Looking at the website here

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitLab at https://gitlab.com/samuel-garratt/soaspec. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

Code of Conduct

Everyone interacting in the Soaspec project’s codebases, issue trackers, chat rooms and mailing lists is expected to follow the code of conduct.