Setup and Tear Down for Test Cases

 In this article, we will see how we perform setup and tear down operation for test cases in vREST.

Here is a video tutorial for the same:

The setup or tear down method is simply yet another test case in vREST. The idea is, you need to implement some kind of logic over REST API to initialize your test application. This can be done in two ways:

1. Implement a REST API endpoint in the test application itself, which is open only in test environment and which will insert the initialization data upon invocation of the API.
   
   
   
   Note: You may also create a separate application which loads data in your database and provides you an API for that.
   
   
2. Create another application, which provide REST APIs to execute commands on the test machine in which test application's data resides. Now with the help of this application, we can insert database dumps through commands and these commands can be invoked via REST APIs.
   
   We have created an external module named as vutil for this purpose. For installation, please visit /wiki/spaces/VE2912/pages/307386.
   
   

   vutil provides a REST API to execute commands on the test machine in which test application's data resides. Now with the help of this API, we can insert database dumps through commands and these commands can be invoked via REST APIs.

   This API execute commands on machines on which this utility is installed.

   API Endpoint:

   The API format is 

   POST {{vutilBaseURL}}/execute/command

   Here {{vutilBaseURL}} is the base URL of the vutil server.

   and this API accepts a single body parameter "command" and its value is the command which you want to execute on your system.

   How to use this API

   Assuming that vutil is running on port 4080 and vutil base URL is "http://localhost:4080"
   
   Let us try to execute a simple command `echo hello` via this utility. Simply create a test case with URL "http://localhost:4080".

   Your test case might look like:
   
   
   
   and provide a request parameter "command" as below screenshot describes:
   
   
   
   and provide some assertions to validate whether the command executed successfully or not.
   
   
   
   and finally the expected body for the test case.
   
   
   Now, if we execute this test case. Then the above REST API executed the command `echo hello` on the remote machine and returned the command output as response as shown in below figure.
   
   
   Hope you got the idea.

   Now, let us take a more practical example of using this utility. Suppose, I want to restore my MongoDB database before I execute my test suite. And my MongoDB dump is stored at {{dataDir}}/xyz-ts-dump directory. Then I can write a separate test case in vREST like below:

   
   
   
   
   Similarly other details can be provided as described in previous example.
   
   You can even execute some custom script via this API to initialize your Test Suite data depending upon your context.