RestFixture

So most of the tests I'm writing now in Fitnesse are using RestFixture. Being able to do all this black box style testing has helped me get a lot of tests up and running without having to change the existing code base. Now I've taken a step future with my own little fork so I can use scenarios and build nice BDD style scripts. But first I want to give me own quick guide to using RestFixture

Step 1: Installing
You can dive straight in by grabbing the latest jar files for RestFixture here https://github.com/smartrics/RestFixture/downloads
If you know what you're doing can get the nodep version to work nicely along side other libraries you may be including in Fitnesse. But I grabbed the 'full' version and unzipped it into a RestFixture folder alongside my FitNesseRoot folder.
Step 2: Write your first test
I took advantage of the built in Fitnesse api as a basic test and wrote a page called RestFixture with the following contents

!define TEST_SYSTEM {slim}

!path RestFixture/lib/*.jar
!path RestFixture/RestFixture.jar

!define expectedReturnHeaders {Content-Length : [\d]+
Content-Type : text/xml }

|!-Table:smartrics.rest.fitnesse.fixture.RestFixture-! | http://localhost:8080|
|GET|/RestFixture?rss|200| ${expectedReturnHeaders} |//title[text()='RestFixture']|

If that runs and passes then congratulations! You've got a working RestFixture install! Step 3: Profit!


Pitfall 1: &
Stuff like /loadpreferences?session=9999&user=admin&module=config would fail and I was scratching my head. Now any good RESTful api designer will tell you that's a stupid url to be using and they'd be write. But it's someone's old mistake and I can either tell them how stupid they are or appreciate the fact it works and move on trying to get everything that's broken working too.
Why did this fail? Well because Fitnesse was turning my & into & and messing up the url with nothing to parse it back. Solution: Surround the url with !- -! to stop Fitnesse doing any parsing on it and it'll work just fine.
Pitfall 2: json + xpath
I was trying to figure out how to handle json that didn't confirm nicely to use xpath commands. Unless your json is wrapped in something like {node: stuff} then the xpath stuff just doesn't work. Something I will try and fix at some point. So i used a lot of the javascript parsing in there to access the jsonbody variable that would work just fine. So I got lots of things like this:

/* javascript */ jsonbody == false;

or this

/* javascript */ 
var match = null;
for (var i=0; i != jsonbody.length && match == null; ++i) {
  var node = jsonbody[i].map;
  if (node.name == 'Bob') {
    match = node;
  }
}
match != null;

or use the let ... js statements like this

response.jsonbody[4].block.name

Pitfall 3: Posting form like data
It's documented in later versions but not in 2.0 beta that you can use set body with url encoded data to behave like posted form data. Very handy. Although I'm still trying to figure out how this can work if combined with a file upload.