nocodb/packages/noco-docs/docs/150.engineering/040.unit-testing.md

title	description	tags
Writing Unit Tests	Overview to Unit Testing	[Engineering]

Unit Tests

• All individual unit tests are independent of each other. We don't use any shared state between tests.
• Test environment includes sakila sample database and any change to it 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.

Pre-requisites

• MySQL is preferred - however tests can fallback on SQLite too

Setup

pnpm --filter=-nocodb install

# add a .env file
cp tests/unit/.env.sample tests/unit/.env

# open .env file
open tests/unit/.env

Configure the following variables

DB_HOST : host DB_PORT : port DB_USER : username DB_PASSWORD : password

Run Tests

pnpm run test:unit

Folder Structure

The root folder for unit tests is packages/nocodb/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.).

Factory Pattern

• 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.

Walk through of writing a Unit Test

We will create an Table test suite as an example.

Configure test

We will configure beforeEach which is called before each test is executed. We will use init function from nocodb/packages/nocodb/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;
});

:::info

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 () => {

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).

Seeding Sample DB (Sakila)

function tableTest() {
  let context;
  let sakilaProject: Project;
  let customerTable: Model;

  beforeEach(async function () {
    context = await init();
    
    /******* Start : Seeding sample database **********/
    sakilaProject = await createSakilaProject(context);
    /******* End : Seeding sample database **********/
    
    customerTable = await getTable({project: sakilaProject, name: 'customer'})
  });

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

    expect(response.body.list[0]['FirstName']).to.equal('MARY');
  });
}