Testing a service function POST response with Jasmine

Question

I'm not entirely sure how to do this but I have a endpoint URL which is a POST request for login authentication. When you add a request payload, you will get either a successful login credential or an error. However, I seem to have problems with fetching the response.

Here is my spec file:

describe('Service: AuthFactory',function(){

    beforeEach(function () {
        module('ui.router');
        module('users');
        module('main');
    });

    var AuthFactory, httpBackend;

    beforeEach(inject(function($httpBackend, $rootScope, $controller, _AuthFactory_){
        httpBackend = $httpBackend;
        AuthFactory = _AuthFactory_;

    }));

    it('Return a POST response from a Service function', function() {
        var url = "http://localhost:3000";
        var dataObj = JSON.stringify({
            inputUser: { user: "TestCase1" },
            inputPass: { password: "TestPass1" }
        });
        httpBackend.expect('POST', url + '/api/AuthService/signIn', dataObj)
            .respond({});

        AuthFactory.signIn(dataObj).success(function(response) {
            console.log(response);
            // outputs Object {}
            // when in reality it should
            // output the response to POST
            // eg: { "login": { "user": "Test_User", "time": 54935934593 }, "outputHead": { "token": asjfjj234kfAd } }
        });

        httpBackend.flush();

        expect(true).toBe(true);
    });
});

and here is my Service.

angular.module('users').factory('AuthFactory', ['$http', function($http) {

var AuthFactory = {};

AuthFactory.signIn = function(data) {
    return $http.post('http://127.0.0.1:3000/api/AuthService/signIn', data);
};

AuthFactory.signOut = function(data) {
    return $http.post('http://127.0.0.1:3000/api/AuthService/signOut', data);
};

return AuthFactory;

}]);

When I run the test, it passes (obviously) but the console.log() outputs Object{}.

And when I use a Chrome extension like Postman. I do an example POST request and the response that returns is the login credentials! So why is it working on Postman but not on my AngularJS Jasmine unit test?

Solution 1

This line is why you get an empty object as your response:

httpBackend.expect('POST', url + '/api/AuthService/signIn', dataObj)
        .respond({});

To give the response you want just add the following:

httpBackend.expect('POST', url + '/api/AuthService/signIn', dataObj)
            .respond({"login": { "user": "Test_User", "time": 54935934593 }, "outputHead": { "token": asjfjj234kfAd }});

See the documentation for more information.

Solution 2

The main thing to remember is that you are mocking the backend service request, and not actually hitting the service. This is done with this statement:

httpBackend.expect('POST', url + '/api/AuthService/signIn', dataObj)
    .respond({});

What this says is for a POST that matches this url, fake a response with an empty object. If you want to fake a response that looks like your real response, you can simply set up that object in the .response function call.

Example:

.respond({login:myuser,authenticated=true}).

If you are trying to test your backend API, you will want to look into other testing frameworks, such as protractor;