BDD Dialect For Web APIs

A scenario describes a test case - essentially it's a list of instructions and expectations.

The framework interprets each step in the scenario using the Web API Dialect.

Read about authentication, proxies and SSL/TLS in Advanced Web APIs .

Let's create a simple example:

@dialect=webapi
Scenario: Test Google's homepage 

Given I enable redirects
When I GET http://google.com/
Then response code should be 200
And header Content-Type should contain text/html

Note: The example deliberately contravenes best practice to showcase a few concepts.

1) Enable redirect handling.
2) Issue an HTTP GET request to Google.
3) Evaluate an arbitrary Javascript expression and store the boolean result in a variable called "ResponseSucceeded".
4) Test that the HTTP status code is 200 (after an initial 302 redirect)
5) Test that a Content-Type exists.
6) Test that a Content-Type contains "text/html".
7) Check that "ResponseSucceeded" variable was set to "true" in line 3. This is redundant since line 4 already makes same assertion.

Working with multiple hosts

You can create a "target" secion in your configuration that allows you to define "hostname", "protocol", "port" and "basePath" outside of your scenarios.

"target": {
	"google": {
		"protocol": "https",
		"hostname": "google.com"
	}
}

Now, we can simply write:

When I GET /

Now, you can run the same feature but specify a different config file to switch targets - for example: from dev -> test -> production.

For more sophisticated environments, you can specify a "targets" section to support named targets.

"targets": {
	"google": {
		"protocol": "https",
		"hostname": "google.com"
	},
	"yahoo": {
		"protocol": "http",
		"hostname": "yahoo.com",
		"port": "80"
	}
}

Then you can switch targets using @target within a feature, scenario or --target for CLI and shell scripts.

This allows us to re-use our features in new environments without recoding. For example:

$ meta4qa --target=yahoo