nocodb/packages/noco-docs/content/en/engineering/unit-test.md

title	description	position	category	menuTitle
Unit Test	How to write unit tests	3300	Engineering	Unit Test

Key points

• We use Mocha as our test runner and chai as our assertion library.
• We use Supertest to test our API endpoints.
• All individual unit tests are independent of each other. We don't use any shared state between tests.
• Test environment also includes sakila database and any change on sakila by a test is reverted before running other tests.
• While running unit tests, it tries to connect to mysql server running on localhost:3306 with username root and password password(which can be configured) and if not found, it will use sqlite as a fallback, hence no requirement of any sql server to run tests.

Walk through of writing a unit test

We will create an Table test suite as an example.

Describing test suite

Create Table test suite by using describe function of mocha.

export default function () {
  describe('Table', tableTests);
}

Configure test

We will configure beforeEach which is called before each test is executed. We will use init function from nocodb/packages/tests/unit/init/index.ts, which is a helper function which configures the test environment(i.e resetting state, etc.).

init does the following things -

• It initializes a Noco instance(reused in all tests).
• Restores meta and sakila database to its initial state.
• Creates the root user.
• Returns context which has auth token for the created user, node server instance(app), and dbConfig.

We will use createProject and createProject factories to create a project and a table.

let context;

beforeEach(async function () {
  context = await init();

  project = await createProject(context);
  table = await createTable(context, project);
});

Test case

We will use it function to create a test case. We will use supertest to make a request to the server. We use expect(chai) to assert the response.

it('Get table list', async function () {
  const response = await request(context.app)
    .get(`/api/v1/db/meta/projects/${project.id}/tables`)
    .set('xc-auth', context.token)
    .send({})
    .expect(200);

  expect(response.body.list).to.be.an('array').not.empty;
});

Integrating the new test suite

We create a new file table.test.ts in packages/nocodb/tests/unit/rest/tests directory.

import 'mocha';
import request from 'supertest';
import init from '../../init';
import { createTable, getAllTables } from '../../factory/table';
import { createProject } from '../../factory/project';
import { defaultColumns } from '../../factory/column';
import Model from '../../../../src/lib/models/Model';
import { expect } from 'chai';

function tableTest() {
  let context;
  let project;
  let table;

  beforeEach(async function () {
    context = await init();

    project = await createProject(context);
    table = await createTable(context, project);
  });

  it('Get table list', async function () {
    const response = await request(context.app)
      .get(`/api/v1/db/meta/projects/${project.id}/tables`)
      .set('xc-auth', context.token)
      .send({})
      .expect(200);

    expect(response.body.list).to.be.an('array').not.empty;
  });
}

export default function () {
  describe('Table', tableTests);
}

We can then import the Table test suite to Rest test suite in packages/nocodb/tests/unit/rest/index.test.ts file(Rest test suite is imported in the root test suite file which is packages/nocodb/tests/unit/index.test.ts).

Running test

To run tests, run npm run test:unit in packages/nocodb directory.

NOTE: We can also run individual test by using .only in describe or it function and the running the test command.

it.only('Get table list', async () => {

Folder structure

The root folder for unit tests is packages/tests/unit

• rest folder contains all the test suites for rest apis.
• model folder contains all the test suites for models.
• factory folder contains all the helper functions to create test data.
• init folder contains helper functions to configure test environment.
• index.test.ts is the root test suite file which imports all the test suites.
• TestDbMngr.ts is a helper class to manage test databases (i.e. creating, dropping, etc.).

Patterns to follow

• Factories

  • Use factories for create/update/delete data. No data should be directly create/updated/deleted in the test.
  • While writing a factory make sure that it can be used with as less parameters as possible and use default values for other parameters.
  • Use named parameters for factories.

    createUser({ email, password})
  

  • Use one file per factory.

Using sakila db

To use sakila db use createSakilaProject from factory/project to create a project. This project will be seeded with sakila tables.

Configurations

• For Mysql db configuration, use the following environment variables to configure.
  • DB_USER : mysql username
  • DB_PASSWORD : mysql password
  • DB_HOST : mysql host
  • DB_PORT : mysql port