#276 Testing Time & Web Requests

Wow, allmost like voodoo. Was just about to question how I would test my external web requests properly and bam you come with this episode ;). Awesome!

The thing I might add for asynchronous requests (or requests that can time out) searched a lot around and the only proper way to make a request timeout seems to be as follows:

def http_api_call( url_address, form_parameters )
begin
    uri = URI.parse( url_address )

    #this shortcut works but we can't set the timeouts...
    #response = Net::HTTP.get_response(uri)

    http = Net::HTTP.new(uri.host, uri.port)

    http.open_timeout = 3
    http.read_timeout = 3
    #request = Net::HTTP::Get.new(uri.request_uri)
    request = Net::HTTP::Post.new(uri.request_uri)
    request.set_form_data( form_parameters )

    response = http.request(request)
    result = response.body.to_s
  rescue Timeout::Error
    result = "WARNING: Connection timeout to external url on "+uri.to_s
  rescue Errno::ECONNREFUSED
    result = "WARNING: Connection refused to external url on "+uri.to_s
  end

  result #give back response string
 end

Using the above way your rails process does not hang if the request fails it just times out (had that problem with a backend that would sometimes fail to respond).

Kind regards and keep up the great work!

More test driven development episodes, it's awesome!

By the way the above does a post request (can do gets too which is commented) and it parses the uri including a port which can be something like http://example.com:5000. Parameters is a hash like:
{:file=>'bla.mp4'}

Thanks for this! - this is really useful - time/web mocking can make tests much much simpler and cleaner.

I'd also like to recommend WebMock
From what I gather, WebMock is a bit more fully-featured (it was even originally inspired by FakeWeb), and also works with non-Net::HTTP - based libraries such as EM-HTTP-Request
Thanks again
Mark

Also have a look at VCR - a great testing tool for recording and playing back http interactions.

Thanks for the introduction to Timecop. It didn't even occur to me that something like that would exist. Thanks!

Great screencast as always, thanks!

One possible improvement (at least for me) is the block usage of Timecop#freeze.

Instead of having to call #return explicitly, I prefer to put the frozen code in a block, like:

Timecop.freeze do
  user.send_password_reset
  # ...
end

That way it automatically returns from the frozen time and also makes explicit which code is frozen via indentation.

Excellent cast as always, and I really like the testing angle. I've got a question though and I was hoping you or anyone else could help me out. I fairly experienced in the app folder, but not quite as much in spec. But alas, I have taken on Ryan's challenge last week and haven't opened the browser since. It's been going great, and I have tons of test coverage, but I'm worried I may have too much - or at least redundant tests. Specifically, I see a lot of overlay between my integration tests and my controller tests. I find that whichever one I write first, it covers about 75% of the other one. That really bugs me. So a few things:

1. Is this normal? I get the feeling it isn't because there really wouldn't be 2 seperate areas to test the same thing.
2. What's some good practices to make sure that there's little overlap between the 2 sections.
3. Do you always start with integration tests, then more to controller, or what are the common coding flows that people use.
4. I'm very good at refactoring app code, but test code, not so much, any suggestions on how to really learn good test code refactoring?

Thanks so much everyone.

Ken

Ryan Bates is a God!!

My first impulse when watching the first part of the episode was "just mock the Time.zone method so that Time.zone.now returns a fixed date"

Wouldn't that have been enough?

Hi Ryan, fantastic episode as alwais.

Do You know a way to test file uploads? e.g size, timeout, type of files (mime), image dimensions,.. ?

And where to put this stub files?

Your just too awesome !! I am blind with true awesomeness :)

Testing with times involved is mostly no fun, particularly because I never heard of Timecop before :) But I found a way to manage it with RSpec matchers:

it "saves the time the password reset was sent" do
  user.send_password_reset
  user.reload.password_reset_sent_at.should be_within(1.second).of(Time.zone.now)
end

I can't believe no one has taken to calling you Dr. Bates yet. Not just for your coding examples, but also because of your ESP in delivering these episodes exactly when others are in need of them. Thanks again!

I can't get the timecop to work in my application.
I hope you guys know what's wrong. I've used Ryans code.
What I see is that the reloaded object has nil for the password_reset_sent_at attribute.

I get:
1) User#send_password_reset saves the time the password reset was sent
Failure/Error: user.reload.password_reset_sent_at.should eq(Time.zone.now)

   expected Fri, 31 Dec -0001 23:40:28 UTC +00:00
        got nil

   (compared using ==)
 # ./spec/models/user_spec.rb:24:in `block (3 levels) in <top (required)>'

# user_spec.rb
    it "saves the time the password reset was sent" do
      Timecop.freeze
      user.send_password_reset

      puts 'printing user password_reset_sent_at'
      p user.password_reset_sent_at
      puts 'printing reloaded user password_reset_sent_at'
      p user.reload.password_reset_sent_at
      puts 'printing last user password_reset_sent_at'
      p User.last.password_reset_sent_at
      user.reload.password_reset_sent_at.should eq(Time.zone.now)
    end

# user.rb (model)
  def send_password_reset
    generate_token(:password_reset_token)
    self.password_reset_sent_at = Time.zone.now
    save!
    UserMailer.password_reset(self).deliver
  end

stdout:
printing user password_reset_sent_at
Fri, 31 Dec -0001 23:40:28 UTC +00:00
printing reloaded user password_reset_sent_at
nil
printing last user password_reset_sent_at
nil

I found that some error while testing with cucumber and fakeweb while you have @javascript tag on cucumber. It time out for some reason. Here is the issue https://github.com/chrisk/fakeweb/issues/25

here is my sollution http://ahmy.yulrizka.com/2011/08/cucumber-timeouterror-timeouterror-on-fakeweb/

Thanks Ryan!

Another alternative for faking Time is Delorean. It's quite similar to Timecop, although it does not offer the freeze capabilities. Check it out, its code is really minimal and beautiful!

https://github.com/bebanjo/delorean

Always a new stuff, thanks Ryan.

Simple Timecop.freeze doesn't work with Oracle db, because:

ORA-01841: (full) year must be between -4713 and +9999, and not be 0

A time must be specified for example Timecop.freeze(DateTime.now)

Another option of RSpec-ing across multiple time zones:
http://approache.com/blog/testing-rails-across-time-zones/

I came across this today when looking to test ActiveResource and it proved to work really nicely, however I then came across ActiveResource::HttpMock which is a specific mocking implementation for active resource which was even easier to get up and running.

Thanks for the cast though, set me on the right path of mocking the web request rather than the ActiveResource itself.