Functional testing Rails controllers with RubyAMF?

[David Spurr]

I was wondering if anyone had any experience of functional testing
your controller with RubyAMF, so that it handles the is_amf &
respond_to appropriately.

[aaron smith]

sorry man, haven't heard anyone doing this.

[David Spurr]

Well I'm trying to knock together some sort of helper that would aid
functional testing with RubyAMF.

My idea goes along the lines of this:

Have a helper that defines a post_amf method, using this from your
functional tests would be just like using the standard post method.

Inside the post_amf method it switches out the controller your testing
for the amf controller and sets things up e.g.:

amf_post :index, [ :param = 'something' ]

1. Serializes the request, with the source set to the name of the
controller your testing & the method name to the one you passed in and
the params put into the body.
2. Switches out the @controller for the amf controller
3. Set anything else up set as the content type on the request
4. Calls the gateway method on the amf controller with the params
(which should now be serialized to amf)
5. Switches back the @controller to what it was

If that works then that 'should' be calling the amf gateway with
exactly what it needs and everything 'should' be doing things as if
they were a normal request.

Then you would also need a helper method to test that the response was
AMF (e.g. used the format.amf) and something to convert that (or do it
after the end of the send) back to something you can test.

I know I'm over-simplifying things there (as I have spent the past
couple of hours trying to get my head around how Rails functional
tests mock out the requests and RubyAMF works to do the above) and I
haven't gotten very far see the pastie code: http://pastie.caboo.se/158549

That code has it calling the gateway how I envisioned it, but I'm
really stuck on trying to serialize something that the gateway would
accept as a valid amf request.

[David Spurr]

I know I didn't post my response too long ago but after a bit of sleep
I've decided that if I can't get some sort of testing for AMF done
then I can't really use it right now. I'm happy to spend the time
creating the test helper and will release anything I create under the
same licence as RubyAMF. But it would be really helpful if some of you
guys who have more knowledge about how RubyAMF works internally could
give me a pointer here and there that would be great.

But firstly is what I want to do even possible. I gave up in the early
hours of the morning when I had something like this to try and
serialize an example request:

amfobj = AMFObject.new
amfbody = AMFBody.new( "", "", obj[:body] )
amfobj.add_body( amfbody )
AMFSerializer.new(amfobj).run

But that didn't work out very well.

I could do with knowing what the absolute minimum is for an amfobj for
the Serializer to do it's work, and how to create stuff like the body
-- e.g. what is the AMFBody.new expecting as it's value param?