I have a booking app that can deal with both local and remote API bookings. Our logic —for (eg) pricing and availability— follows two very different pathways. We obviously need to test both.
But running regular tests against a remote API is slow. The test environment provided manages a response in 2-17 seconds. It's not feasible to use this in my pre_commit tests. Even if they sped that up, it's never going to be fast and will always require a connection to pass.
But I still need to test our internal logic for API bookings.
Is there some way that within a test runner, I can spin up a little webserver (quite separate to the Django website) that serves a reference copy of their API. I can then plug that into the models we're dealing with and query against that locally, at speed.
What's the best way to handle this?
Again, I need to stress that this reference API should not be part of the actual website. Unless there's a way of adding views that only apply at test-time. I'm looking for clean solutions. The API calls are pretty simple. I'm not looking for verification or anything like that here, just that bookings made against an API are priced correctly internally, handle availability issues, etc.
for your test porpuse you can mock api call functions.
you can see more here:
https://williambert.online/2011/07/how-to-unit-testing-in-django-with-mocking-and-patching/
Each of the team that we support should be able to use JMeter for their own performance testing. We have to give a demonstration of how to use JMeter from the developers perspective. How you would use Jmeter.
How to use Mockito? When we do LnP testing the services that we are testing have Db2 mainframe access to them. When we do that the mainframe seems to be unpredictable in such a way that, when we run the same test two times in a row, we get two different answers It's because of some kind of mainframes performance problem. We don't want to measure that. We want to measure the service itself. Instead of calling the DB, What we have to do is 'We have to Mock that, mock the method.
Take one of the Consumer WebService, Create a simple JMeter test with a mock DB and we should be able to demonstrate that.
If we don't have a server, we have to mock that (the service). Take a copy of the software, install it and measure the performance of it.
Maybe do something that changes the performance of it. Whatever it is, when you run it again, it should change the performance of it.
Where to start? I have a project with different modules in it and I can see some Web Service Provider module. Do I need to use JMeter plugin in eclipse for this?
or use JMeter? Please suggest.
I am already familiar with simulation using WSDL and coded XML and/or JSON objects (SOAP UI, as an example). While this could be an option, it is rather heavyweight. It also does not easily work across multiple teams consuming the same service. And there is quite a bit of coding for REST, as REST is still in infant stages.
Use case: A dev team starts with a contract (I give you X and you return object Y) and an acceptance matrix (specific X inputs with the expected Y outputs) and the tool would fire up a simulated service that fulfills the requirements.
The ideal is a tool that can be included in part of a continuous integration cycle. Platform/language not extremely important, as these are service endpoints.
I may be envisioning something that is not currently created (opportunity?), but I would imagine at least one vendor has created something like this. I just have not found it yet.
I have not used the project myself, but you could have a look at json-server ( https://github.com/typicode/json-server ). It allows you to setup a fake rest server using fake data.
The company where I work is a software vendor with a suite of applications. There are also a number of web services, and of course they have to be kept stable even if the applications change. We haven't always succeeded with this, and sometimes a customer finds that a service is not behaving as before after upgrading.
We now want to handle this better. In general, web services shouldn't change, and if they have to, at least we will know about it and document the change.
But how do we ensure this? One idea is to compare the WSDL files with the previous versions at every release. That will make sure the interfaces don't change, but it won't detect that the behavior changes, for example if a bug is introduced in some common library.
Another idea is to build up a suite of service tests, for example using soapUI. But then we'll never know if we have covered enough cases.
What are some best practices regarding this?
I think, you can definitely be confident of the stability of the services If you keep updating your service tests with the latest changes in the service and I think this is one of the best practices people use before they deploy.
Also, In general, I think what would probably matter is how well the unit testing is being done by the developers who are writing the components(libraries) used by the services. Are those unit tests being updated with the changes in the components being used by the service.
There as two kinds of changes for a web service, breaking change and non-breaking change. Breaking change is like changing the signature of a web method or changing a datacontract schema. Non-breaking change is like adding a new web method or adding an optional member to a datcontract. In general your client should continue to work with a non-breaking change. I don't know which technology you are using but use versioing in service namespace and datacontract namespace following W3C recommendations. You can even continue to host different versions at different endpoints. This way your clients will break if they try to use a new version of your service without re-generating the proxy from the new version of WSDL or continue to use the old version.
Some WCF specific links are
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms731060.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms733832.aspx
I wouldn't consider behaviour change as a change in SOA sense. That is more like fixing defects.
IMO, aside from monitoring the WSDL for changes (which is really only necessary if you have a willy-nilly implementation ("promote-to-production") strategy), the only way to really ensure that everythign is operational and stable, is to perform continuous, automated, periodic, functional testing with a test suite that provides complete coverage of both the WSDL and the underlying application functionality, including edge cases. The test cases should be version controlled just like the app and WSDL, and should be developed in parallel to new versions of the app (not afterward, as a reaction).
This can all be automated with SoapUI. Ideally, logging results somewhere that can be accumulated and reported on some dashboard, so that if somethign breaks, you know when it broke, and hopefully correlate that to an event such as an application update, or something more benign such as a service pack being pushed, electrical work being performed, etc..
However... do as I say, not as I do. I have been unsuccessful in pushing this strategy at work. Your votes will tell me whether I should push harder or do something else!
I'm using BizUnit to unit-tests my Biztalk orchestrations, but some orchestrations consume a WebService,and testing these seems more like integration testing than unit testing.
I'm familiar with using a mocking framework to mock the generated proxy objects, in order to test a web service from a Windows Forms application, but I would like to be able to do it in a more integrated way in a request-response port?
How would you approach this problem?
This goes to the heart of one of my main irritations as a BizTalk developer - BizTalk does not lend it self to unit testing. From the fact the 99% of your interfaces into BizTalk applications are message based and have a huge number of possible inputs, through to the opaque nature of orchestrations, BizTalk offers no real way of testing units of functionality as... well... units.
For BizTalk, integration tests are sadly often the only game in town.
That results in, due to no fault on the part of Kevin Smith, BizUnit being (IMO) a misnomer. A better name would perhaps be BizIntegrationIt. BizUnit offers a range of tools that assist in integration testing, the majority of its tests, like checking if a file has been written to a given directory or sending an HTTPRequest to a BizTalk HTTPReceive location are all strictly speaking, testing integration.
Now that I've gotten that rant out, what you are asking for is something I've been thinking about for a long time, the ability to create automated unit tests that give some real confidence that my making a small change to a map won't suddenly break something else downstream, as well as a way to remove dependance on external services.
I've never thought of any nice way of doing this but below is a solution that should work, I've done variations of each part of this in isolation but never tried to but them all together in this specific form.
So given the desire to mock a call to some external service (that may not even exist yet) without needing to actually make any external call and wanting to have the ability to set expectations for that service call and to specify the nature of the response, the only method I can think of is to develop a custom adapter.
Mock webservice using custom adapter
If you build a custom request-response adapter you can plug it into your send port in place of the SOAP adapter. You can then specify properties for the adapter that allow it to behave as a mock of your webservice. The adapter would be similar in concept to a loopback adapter but would allow internal mocking logic.
Things that you might want to include as adapter properties:
Expected document (perhaps a disk location that specifies an example of what you expect your BizTalk applicaiton to send to the webservice).
Response document - the document that the adapter will send back to the messaging engine.
Specific expectations for the test such as lookup values in document elements.
You could also have the custom adapter write to disk and setup a BizUnit step to validate the file that was written out.
Building a custom adapter is non-trivial, but possible, you can get a good start from the BizTalk Adapter Wizard and there is an article on deploying custom adapters here.
There is a bug in the code generated by the wizard, you will need to change new Guid(""), to new Guid().
There are also some examples of building custom adapters in the BizTalk SDK.
Another option is to use a plain http page and the HTTP solicit response as discussed here, all your logic goes in the http page. This is probably simpler if you are happy having an http call, and setting up an IIS port to listen for your test.
Initialising unit tests
You can import binding files into a BizTalk application using a .bat file.
If you make a new binding file for each test you run, as well as for your standard applicaiton set up, you can then run the appropriate batch file to apply the right binding.
Each binding file would change your webservice sendport to use the mock custom adapter and set the specific properties for that test.
You could then even make a custom BizUnit step that (perhaps) generated binding settings based on settings in the test step and then ran the shell commands to update the bindings.
Testing Message Contents
A final thing that you might want to consider, to really tie all this together, is some way of testing the contents of messages. You could do this in your mock adapter, but that would get tedious very quickly for large messages, or for a large range of possible input messages.
One option is to make a custom pipeline that calls Schematron to validate files that it receives. Schematron is a schema language that allows a much richer level of file inspection that xsd, so you can check things like "If element x contains this content, I expect element y to be present".
If you built a custom pipeline that took a schematron schema as a parameter, you could then swap in a testing file for a specific unit test, validating that for this test, when you call the webservice you get a file that actually matches what you want (and doesn't just match the xsd)
As a co-author of BizUnitExtensions (www.codeplex.com/bizunitextensions) i agree that the name "unit" in BizUnit can be confusing but for Biztalk, the 'integration test' is the unit test. Some Biztalk folk have successfully used mocks to test pipeline components and other test harnesses (+ BizUnit/Extensions) to test schemas and maps.
Orchestrations unfortunately are opaque. But theres are good reasons for that.
(a) Because of the huge subscription system in the message box - that orchestrations use when being activated etc, it is not possible to fire up some "virtual" process to host the orchestration (which can be done for pipelines. Tomas Restrepo has done something along these lines).
(b) Also, how would this virtual process handle persistence and dehydration?. I'd wager that people using WF would have the same problem in trying to test the workflow fully.
(c) we dont work with the C# directly, so there is no way we can "inject" a mock
interface into the orchestration code.
(d) An orchestration is not really a "unit". its a composite element. The units are the messages going to and from the message box and the external components called through expression shapes.So even if you could inject a mock webservice interface you cannot inject mock message boxes and correlation sets and other things.
One thing that can be done for orchestrations (and i've been considering an addition to the BizUnitExtensions library to do this) is to link in with the OrchestrationProfiler tool as that tool gives a pretty detailed report of all the shapes and somehow check that individual steps were executed (and perhaps the time it took for execution). This could go quite far in making the orchestration a bit more of a white box.Also considering that the orchestration debugger shows a lot of the variable values, surely it must be possible to get that info via an API to show what the values of variables were at a given point for a given instance.
Back to Richard's question though, my previous dev team had a solution. Basically what we did was to write a generic configurable HttpHandler that parsed incoming service requests and returned pre-set responses. The response sent back was configurable based on conditions such as XPath. In the BUILD and DEV binding files, the webservice end point was the mock. This worked brilliantly in isolating the BUILD and DEV environments from the actual third party webservices. This also helped in a "contract first" approach where we built the mock and the orch developer used it while the webservice author went ahead and built the actual service.
[Update:17-FEB-09: this tool is now on codeplex : http://www.codeplex.com/mockingbird.
If this approach sounds interesting check it out and let me know what you think of the tool ]
Now, before someone throws the old "WHAT ABOUT MOCK OBJECT FRAMEWORKS" chestnut in, let me say that the utility above was used for both Biztalk 'consumers' as well as non Biztalk consumers, BUT i have also worked with NMock2 and found that to be an excellent way to mock interfaces and set expectations when writing CLR consumers. (I'm going to be looking into MoQ and TypeMock etc soon). However, it wont work with orchestrations for the reasons described above.
Hope this helps.
Regards,
Benjy
Don't.
Don't test against arbitrary interfaces, and don't create mocks for them.
Most people seem to see developer (unit) testing as intended for testing nontrivial, individual units of functionality such as a single class. On the other hand, it is also important to perform customer (acceptance/integration) testing of major subsystems or the entire system.
For a web service, the nontrivial unit of functionality is hidden in the classes that actually perform the meaningful service, behind the communication wiring. Those classes should have individual developer test classes that verify their functionality, but completely without any of the web-service-oriented communication wiring. Naturally, but maybe not obviously, that means that your implementation of the functionality must be separate from your implementation of the wiring. So, your developer (unit) tests should never ever see any of that special communication wiring; that is part of integration and it can be viewed (appropriately) as a "presentation" issue rather than "business logic".
The customer (acceptance/integration) tests should address a much bigger scale of functionality, but still not focused on "presentation" issues. This is where the use of the Facade pattern is common--exposing a subsystem with a unified, coarse-grained, testable interface. Again, the web service communication integration is irrelevant and is implemented separately.
However, it is very useful to implement a separate set of tests that actually do include the web service integration. But I strongly recommend against testing only one side of that integration: test it end-to-end. That means building tests that are web service clients just like the real production code; they should consume the web services exactly the way that the real application(s) do(es), which means that those tests then serve as examples to anyone who must implement such applications (like your customers if you are selling a library).
So, why go to all that trouble?
Your developer tests verify that your functionality works in-the-small, regardless of how it is accessed (independent of presentation tier since it is all inside the business logic tier).
Your customer tests verify that your functionality works in-the-large, again regardless of how it is accessed, at the interface boundary of your business logic tier.
Your integration tests verify that your presentation tier works with your business logic tier, which is now managable since you can now ignore the underlying functionality (because you separately tested it above). In other words, these tests are focused on a thin layer of a pretty face (GUI?) and a communication interface (web services?).
When you add another method of accessing your functionality, you only have to add integration tests for that new form of access (presentation tier). Your developer and customer tests ensure that your core functionality is unchanged and unbroken.
You do not need any special tools, such as a test tool specifically for web services. You use the tools/components/libraries/techniques that you would use in production code, exactly as you would use them in such production code. This makes your tests more meaningful, since you are not testing someone else's tools. It saves you lots of time and money, since you are not buying, deploying, developing for, and maintaining for a special tool. However, if you are testing through a GUI (don't do that!), you might need one special tool for that part (e.g., HttpUnit?).
So, let's get concrete. Assume that we want to provide some functionality for keeping track of the cafeteria's daily menu ('cause we work in a mega-corp with its own cafe in the building, like mine). Let's say that we are targeting C#.
We build some C# classes for menus, menu items, and other fine-grained pieces of functionality and its related data. We establish an automated build (you do that, right?) using nAnt that executes developer tests using nUnit, and we confirm that we can build a daily menu and look at it via all these little pieces.
We have some idea of where we are going, so we apply the Facade pattern by creating a single class that exposes a handful of methods while hiding most of the fine-grained pieces. We add a separate set of customer tests that operate only through that new facade, just as a client would.
Now we decide that we want to provide a web page for our mega-corp knowledge workers to check today's cafeteria menu. We write an ASP.NET page, have it invoke our facade class (which becomes our model if we are doing MVC), and deploy it. Since we have already thoroughly tested the facade class via our customer tests, and since our single web page is so simple, we forego writing automated tests against the web page--a manual test using a few fellow knowledge workers will do the trick.
Later, we start adding some major new functionality, like being able to preorder our lunch for the day. We extend our fine-grained classes and the corresponding developer tests, knowing that our pre-existing tests guard us against breaking existing functionality. Likewise, we extend our facade class, perhaps even splitting off a new class (e.g., MenuFacade and OrderFacade) as the interface grows, with similar additions to our customer tests.
Now, perhaps, the changes to the website (two pages is a website, right?) make manual testing unsatisfactory. So, we bring in a simple tool comparable to HttpUnit that allows nUnit to test web pages. We implement a battery of integration/presentation tests, but against a mock version of our facade classes, because the point here is simply that the web pages work--we already know that the facade classes work. The tests push and pull data through the mock facades, only to test that the data successfully made it to the other side. Nothing more.
Of course, our grand success prompts the CEO to request (demand) that we expose the web application to mega-corp's BlackBerrys. So we implement some new pages and a new battery of integration tests. We don't have to touch the developer or customer tests, because we have added no new core functionality.
Finally, the CTO requests (demands) that we extend our cafeteria application to all of mega-corp's robotic workers--you did notice them over the last few days? So, now we add a web services layer that communicates through our facade. Again, no changes to our core functionality, our developer tests, or our customer tests. We apply the Adapter/Wrapper pattern by creating classes that expose the facade with an equivalent web service API, and we create client-side classes to consume that API. We add a new battery of integration tests, but they use plain nUnit to create client-side API classes, which communicate over the web service wiring to the service-side API classes, which invoke mock facade classes, which confirm that our wiring works.
Note that throughout this whole process, we did not need anything significant beyond our production platform and code, our chosen development platform, a few open-source components for automated building and testing, and a few well-defined batteries of tests. Also note that we didn't test anything that we don't use in production, and we didn't test anything twice.
We ended up with a solid core of functionality (business logic tier) that has proven itself mature (hypothetically). We have three separate presentation tier implementations: a website targeted to desktops, a website targeted to BlackBerrys, and a web service API.
Now, please forgive me for the long answer--I tire of inadequate answers and I did not want to provide one. And please note that I have actually done this (though not for a cafeteria menu).
This is a very interesting question that I still haven't seen a good generic answer to. Some people suggest using SoapUI but I haven't had time to actually test that yet. This page might be interesting on that.
Another way might be to somehow wrap the WebDev.WebHost.dll and use that ... Phil Hakkck discusses that in this post.
It's also be discussed before on SO here.
Please let us know if you find another solution to this!
This is the way to do it:
Back to Richard's question though, my
previous dev team had a solution.
Basically what we did was to write a
generic configurable HttpHandler that
parsed incoming service requests and
returned pre-set responses. The
response sent back was configurable
based on conditions such as XPath
I haven't had to do this in a while, but when I would test my Biztalk Apps I always used either soap ui or web service studio. I was able to test different input values without effort.