Rails%203%20In%20Action

The projects API
The first element of this result is the HTTP status code, and in this case it indicates
that your fictional response was 200, or in human-terms: OK. The second element contains
no special HTTP headers, but you’ll see these as you progress in the next section.
Finally, the third element contains a string, which represents the body of this request,
returning the string “Hello World!”
Using Rack::Test::Methods, you can initiate requests to your application’s API
that then return these Rack responses, and you can then use these responses to check
that your API is responding in the correct way. You’re purposely not using the standard
RSpec controller tests here to make sure that the precise URLs are responding in the
correct manner, instead of only testing that the actions are doing what you tell them.
Let’s get into writing this initial test for your API.
13.1.1 Your first API
You’re going to continue on the running theme of “test everything” with your API, and
with the rack-test gem you’ve got the necessary tools to test what your API’s URLs are
doing. Rather than testing this in Cucumber, you’re instead going to use RSpec, which
provides a nicer DSL for testing your APIs. To begin with, you’re going to create a new
folder structure at spec/apis/v1. You should name the apis directory as a plural for two
reasons: first, it matches the consistency of the other directories in the spec directory;
and second, it may one day contain more than one API version. Then you’ll create a
new file called spec/apis/v1/projects_spec.rb and begin to fill it with the following:
require "spec_helper"
describe "/api/v1/projects", :type => :api
do
end
There’s much more code to come after this short snippet, but it’s a pretty good start.
In the describe block here you pass through an option of :type => :api. What
does this do? Well, you can use it to modify the behavior of this describe block in
many ways, such as including modules. The Rack::Test::Methods module you’re
going to use needs to be included into each test. Rather than doing this manually, you
can use this :type option to do the include for you, as well as some additional behavior.
Let’s open a new file at spec/support/api/helper.rb and put the content from the
following listing inside.
Listing 13.2 spec/support/api/helper.rb
module ApiHelper
include Rack::Test::Methods
def app
Rails.application
end
end
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