Question

I’ve just added shouldjs and mocha to my express app for testing, but I’m wondering how to test my application. I would like to do it like this:

app = require '../app'
routes = require '../src/routes'

describe 'routes', ->
  describe '#show_create_user_screen', ->
    it 'should be a function', ->
      routes.show_create_user_screen.should.be.a.function
    it 'should return something cool', ->
      routes.show_create_user_screen().should.be.an.object

Of course, the last test in that test-suite just tells med that the res.render function (called within show_create_user_screen) is undefined, probably becouse the server is not running and the config has not been done. So I wonder how other people set up their tests?

Answer 1

OK, first although testing your routing code is something you may or may not want to do, in general, try to separate your interesting business logic in pure javascript code (classes or functions) that are decoupled from express or whatever framework you are using and use vanilla mocha tests to test that. Once you’ve achieved that if you want to really test the routes you configure in mocha, you need to pass mock req, res parameters into your middleware functions to mimic the interface between express/connect and your middleware.

For a simple case, you could create a mock res object with a render function that looks something like this.

describe 'routes', ->
  describe '#show_create_user_screen', ->
    it 'should be a function', ->
      routes.show_create_user_screen.should.be.a.function
    it 'should return something cool', ->
      mockReq = null
      mockRes =
        render: (viewName) ->
          viewName.should.exist
          viewName.should.match /createuser/

      routes.show_create_user_screen(mockReq, mockRes).should.be.an.object

Also just FYI middleware functions don’t need to return any particular value, it’s what they do with the req, res, next parameters that you should focus on in testing.

Here is some JavaScript as you requested in the comments.

describe('routes', function() {
    describe('#show_create_user_screen', function() {
      it('should be a function', function() {
        routes.show_create_user_screen.should.be.a["function"];
      });
      it('should return something cool', function() {
        var mockReq = null;
        var mockRes = {
          render: function(viewName) {
            viewName.should.exist;
            viewName.should.match(/createuser/);
          }
        };
        routes.show_create_user_screen(mockReq, mockRes);
      });
    });
  });