Best practices for POST and related tests

[stablekernel]

Best practices for POST and related tests

[joeconwaystk]

1. Are you using HTTPController? HTTPController decodes the body as part of its processing, so by the time you get your responder method invoked, requestBodyObject is already valid.
2. Are you testing in IntelliJ IDEA? It sometimes doesn't pick up standard output, which is really a pain. Running tests from the terminal (pub run test -j 1) is what I do when it fails to pick up stdout. It's really obnoxious when you want to see the stack trace of the server itself, which is often. There is a flag on RequestController for this purpose, includeErrorDetailsInServerErrorResponses, which if true, returns the stack trace of a 500 in the JSON body.

[kbirch]

Okay awesome, thank you. Re: item 1... Yes to HTTPController, and originally I had included the decode call as per the code comment and in the absence of other examples I could find:

 /// The request body object, as determined by how it was decoded.
 ///
 /// This value will be null until [decodeBody] is executed or if there is no request body.

But I see now that it is already called inside of your HTTPController code, cool - simplifies things nicely.

On item 2, command line does what I need, thank you. I had seen this issue in browser-based projects before but not backend projects to this point, probably should have played around a bit more before flagging it - thanks for bearing with me. And the flag on RequestController is super helpful - just tried it, works well.

All done here :) Thanks again.

[joeconwaystk]

Btw, another reason HTTPController decodes the body for you (if and only if it plans to process the request) is because x-www-form-urlencoded data gets treated as query values for @HTTPQuery parameters, and so the body needs to be parsed prior to executing the responder method.

I also realized you just brought up an important point: we really need a forum for Aqueduct. We'll get working on that. Closing this issue.