I'm trying to test a small Sinatra app using rspec. I want to pass a rather complex payload and am running into issues i do not understand: my payload contains an array of hashes. When I run the actual application this will work as expected, yet when I use the post helper to run my tests, the array will contain a merged hash:
post(
"/#{bot}/webhook",
sessionId: "test-session-#{session_counter}",
result: {
contexts: [
{ some: 'fixture' },
{ name: 'generic', parameters: { facebook_sender_id: 'zuck-so-cool' } }
]
}
)
In the sinatra handler I use params to access this payload:
post '/:bot/webhook' do |bot|
do_something_with(params)
end
When I now look at the structure of params when running the test suite, I will see the following structure:
[{"some" => "fixture", "name" => "generic", "parameters" => {"facebook_sender_id" => "zuck-so-cool"}}]
which I do not really understand. Is this a syntax issue (me being a ruby noob), am I using params wrong, or is this a bug?
EDIT: So i found out this is an "issue" with the way that Rack::Test will serialize the given payload when not specifying how to (i.e. as form data). If I pass JSON and pass the correct headers it will do what I expect it to do:
post(
"/#{bot}/webhook",
{
sessionId: "test-session-#{session_counter}",
result: {
contexts: [
{ some: 'fixture' },
{ name: 'generic', parameters: { facebook_sender_id: 'zuck-so-cool' } }
]
}
}.to_json,
{ 'HTTP_ACCEPT' => 'application/json', 'CONTENT_TYPE' => 'application/json' }
)
Still I am unsure of this is an issue with the passed data structure not being possible to be serialized into form data or if this is a bug in the way that Rack::Test serializes data.
Looking at the relevant portion of the specs it looks like this is is expected behavior.