Unit Testing Express Controllers

Question

I am having trouble unit testing with Express on a number of fronts, seems to be a lack of documentation and general info online about it.

So far I have found out I can test my routes with a library called supertest ( https://github.com/visionmedia/superagent ), but what if I have broken my routes and controllers up, how can I go about testing my controllers independently of their routes.

here is my test:

describe("Products Controller", function() {
    it("should add a new product to the mongo database", function(next) {
        var ProductController = require('../../controllers/products');
        var Product = require('../../models/product.js');

        var req = { 
            params: {
                name: 'Coolest Product Ever',
                description: 'A very nice product'
            } 
        };

        ProductController.create(req, res);

    });
});

req is easy enough to mockup. res not so much, I tried grabbing express.response, hoping I could just inject it but this hasn't worked. Is there a way to simulate the res.send object? Or am I going the wrong way about this?

Answer 1

When you are testing your routes, you don't actually use the inbuilt functions. Say for example, ProductController.create(req, res);

What you basically need to do is, run the server on a port and send a request for each url. As you mentioned supergent, you can follow this code.

describe("Products Controller", function() {
    it("should add a new product to the mongo database", function(next) {
        const request = require('superagent');
        request.post('http://localhost/yourURL/products')
            .query({ name: 'Coolest Product Ever', description: 'A very nice product' })
            .set('Accept', 'application/json')
            .end(function(err, res){
                if (err || !res.ok) {
                    alert('Oh no! error');
                } else {
                    alert('yay got ' + JSON.stringify(res.body));
                }
       });
    });
});

You can refer to superagent request examples here .