As it turns out, in Rails 3.x, webrat and cucumber don’t play along so well. You start getting horribly annoying, and difficult to solve error messages. The solution in that link is to change the testing method from Rails to Rack. That works, for things like visiting pages, but it broke all of my API tests, where I verify the response code of the body and the JSON that I get back.
I looked into upgrading cucumber-rails, and apparently they recommend using Capybara instead of webrat for Rails 3. So I make the necessary changes. Unfortunately Capybara only has a get method. You can only visit pages. Any posts should be exercised by the web forms. This is far less than useful. It has proven to be a huge pain the butt. Hours of trying to find how people do this to no avail. Until I find an obscure answer, at the bottom of a StackOverflow posting.
That code on github is the key to testing APIs. It appears to use some of the more internal guts of the Capybara page drivers to accomplish it’s goal. Works for me.
I am surprised to see that there are few integration test frameworks that support this kind of web service test. Especially since where I work, this is what we build. Having Cucumber features describing those API calls makes everyone’s job easier. I find it unfortunate that it seems to be somewhat ignored by the testing community. Hopefully this will contain the necessary words for other people that are searching for the same thing I spent hours searching for, and will find it in far less time.
