Testing

There are 2 main kinds of tests in superdesk: unit tests (run with nosetests) and behaviour-driven tests (run with behave). You can use pip install -r dev-requirements.txt in your Python environement to install the needed dependencies.

Mocking tests with behave

Behave tests are end-to-end, and may be using network calls. In some cases, we may desire to keep the network access to detect an API change in external service (for instance it’s the case with GeoNames), in other cases it’s better to mock the call to avoid network access to retrieve data on each run of tests (network access can slow down the whole process, they may fail resulting in the whole test run failing, and they consume resources).

If you want to mock network call in behave, you may, in some tests, append the text (mocking with "{mock_file}") where {mock_file} is the name of a JSON file available in your fixtures directory. This files specify which URL to mock, and how to do it.

Here is an example of a step using mocking:

When we fetch from "ninjs" ingest "ninjs4.json" (mocking with "ninjs4_mock.json")

Here is an example of a typical mocking file:

{
    "requests": {
        "http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/digital-nature-10485007.jpg": {
            "get": {
                "binary": "digital-nature-10485007.jpg"
            }
        }
    }
}

It is a JSON object where key can, so far, only be requests, meaning that you want to mock an HTTP request (it works only for requests done using the Python Requests module).

The requests value is another object where each key is an URL to mock. The URL links to an object containing the verb to mock (only GET is supported for now, the key is case insensitive). Finally the verb link to and object containing the mocking data. You may use one of the following key in this last object:

key	use
binary	A file must be returned. The value is the name of the file to send, which must be in the same fixtures directory as the mocking file. content_type default to application/octet-stream
text	A text is returned as body. content_type default to text/plain
json	A JSON object is returned. content_type default to application/json

If you don’t want to use the default content_type, you can specify another one in the key of the same name.