TestDispatch

TestDispatch adds the ability to use controller tests as integration tests without using headless browsers. It allows tests to submit forms, click on links, follow redirects and receive mails.

Documentation

Documentation can be found on HexDocs

Dependencies

• Floki v0.25.x and up
• TestSelector

Installation

The package can be installed by adding test_dispatch to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
    {:test_dispatch, "~> 0.3.3"}
  ]
end

Usage

submit_form

Import TestDispatch in your test module or your test case and you can call submit_form/3 from there.

To use submit_form/3 a request has to be made to a page where a form is present. The conn that is received will be parsed by the submit_form/3 and the form will be dispatched with the attributes that are given or the default values when they are not given.

defmodule MyAppWeb.MyTest do
  use MyAppWeb.ConnCase
  import TestDispatch

  test "dispatches form with attributes and entity" do
    conn = build_conn()

    assert conn
           |> get(Routes.user_path(conn, :new))
           |> submit_form(%{name: "John Doe", email: "[email protected]"}, :user)
           |> redirected_to(Routes.user_path(conn, :index))
  end

  test "dispatches form with default values and test_selector" do
    conn = build_conn()

    assert conn
           |> get(Routes.user_path(conn, :index))
           |> submit_form(User.IndexView.test_selector("batch-action"))
           |> html_response(200)
  end
end

submit_form/3 will find a form in the HTML response of the given conn by entity or by test_selector, or, if no entity or test_selector is provided, it will target the last form found in the response.

Next it will look for form controls (inputs, selects), convert these to params and use the attributes passed to submit_form/3 to update the values of the params. The params will now only contain field keys found in the controls of the form.

If an entity is given, the params will be prepended by this entity. So for:

submit_form(conn, %{name: "John Doe", email: "[email protected]"}, :user)

this will result in the following params:

%{"user" => %{name: "John Doe", email: "[email protected]"}}

Ultimately, the conn is dispatched to the conn's private.phoenix_endpoint using Phoenix.ConnTest.dispatch/5, with the params and with the method and action found in the form.

Clicking on links in mails

During the tests emails might be sent that we want to integrate in our flow. For that there is receive_mail/2. It expects the conn as the first argument and the found email will be added to the conn as the resp_body. Using the conn combined with the click_link/4 function you can simulate "clicking" on the link in an email.

build_conn()
|> get("/posts/1")
|> click_link("post-123-send-as-mail")
|> receive_mail()
|> click_link("post-123-show")
|> html_response(200)

TestDispatch expects the email to be sent with the message {:delivered_email, %{} = email} where the mail should contain at least the to:, from: and subject:, html_body: fields.

When the mail is not received it will raise an error. Specific emails can be targeted by adding the :subject, :to or :from to the second argument of receive mail in a map.

receive_mail(conn, %{submit: "This exact message", to: "[email protected]"})