Mocking XHR requests with Cypress

Marie Drake

Principal Test Automation Engineer @ News UK

mariedrake.com         @mcruzdrake 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/marie-drake/

 

Cypress lunch and learn recap

  • Cypress functional testing ✅
  • Cypress API testing ✅
  • Cypress Visual testing with Applitools ✅
  • Testing iframes with Cypress ✅

What is a Mock API?

  • Imitation of the real API which sends expected responses to a request
  • Requires great understanding of the real API so it can be imitated correctly

Real API

👍🏼 Tests the real behaviour

👍🏼 Catch performance issues

👍🏼 More confidence that critical paths are verified

👍🏼 Straightforward to test

API mocks

👍🏼 Speeds up development

👍🏼 Speeds up testing

👍🏼 Quicker to run

👍🏼 Simulate delays

👍🏼 Avoids flaky tests as results are deterministic

👍🏼 Simulate different scenarios easily and test different status codes

 

Real API

👎🏼 Slower to run

👎🏼 Requires a dedicated environment

👎🏼 Can cause flaky tests if the API is still in development mode

👎🏼 Makes application under test dependent on other services

API mocks

👎🏼 More effort to maintain

👎🏼 Bugs can be missed if mock API is not updated

 

Should I mock or should I not?

Consider a Hybrid Approach

Testing real API endpoints with Cypress

/// <reference types="cypress" />

describe('Todo API', () => {
  it('returns a JSON data', () => {
    cy.request('/todos')
      .its('headers')
      .its('content-type')
      .should('include', 'application/json');
  });
});

Let's mock API requests with Cypress!

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What we did

  • Introduced cy.server()
  • Introduced cy.route()
  • Mock a specific request
  • Simulated scenarios where API is returning data or not

Additional Resources

Any questions?

Mocking XHR requests with Cypress

By Marie Cruz

Mocking XHR requests with Cypress

In this lunch and learn session, we'll look at how we can mock XHR requests with Cypress.

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