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Ensuring Elixir Application Performance with Testing and ExUnit

Setup Block for Testing JSON-based APIs

Get familiarized with the basic structure and setup block for testing JSON-based APIs.

We'll cover the following...

Testing the update endpoint

In the included repo, NotSkull, let’s create a new test file at test/not_skull_web/controllers/json_api/user_controller_test.exs.

Note: We’ve added nesting under json_api to avoid conflicting with the tests for the user controller that we used for the server-rendered HTML endpoint.

The following code will add a basic structure and setup block to the file we created:

Elixir
#file path -> test/not_skull_web/controllers/json_api/user_controller_test.exs
defmodule NotSkullWeb.JsonApi.UserControllerTest do
  use NotSkullWeb.ConnCase, async: false  
  alias NotSkull.Accounts.User
  describe "PUT /api/users/:id" do
    setup context do
      {:ok, user} = Factory.insert(:user)
      conn_with_token = 
        put_req_header(  
          context.conn,
          "authorization",
          "Bearer " <> sign_jwt(user.id)  
        )
      Map.merge(context, %{user: user, conn_with_token: conn_with_token})
    end
  end
end

A couple of things to note here:

  • When starting a new Phoenix project, the generators will create a few different ExUnit test cases. One of them, ConnCase, or specifically NotSkull.ConnCase in our app, will be used as the test case for all the HTTP-based interfaces. As seen on line 3, ...