Need help understanding unittests

[Daniel Watrous]

I have spent a few days looking over the only example I can find about unittesting: https://firebase.google.com/docs/functions/unit-testing#testing_http_functions

I followed this to the following file, but I really don't understand the highlighted lines of code

https://github.com/firebase/functions-samples/blob/master/quickstarts/uppercase/functions/test/test.offline.js#L119-L135

I have a test right now that should be failing, but it's passing, so I know the assertion isn't being called. I'm not sure what would call "redirect" or when that might be something else or what values/names would make sense there. I know my function is getting called, but it's a dialogflow directive, like "conv.ask(...)" or "conv.close(...)". I know those return HTTP responses when deployed, but I'm not sure if they do when called by the unittests. 

Any ideas to help me with this?

[Abe Haskins (Firebase)]

Hey Daniel!

In my personal opinion, that sample isn't very practical for testing HTTPS onRequest handlers IRL. All our HTTPS handlers are wrappers around Express.js which means that mocking out a complete response is not trivial and results in issues like what you're seeing.

My preference is to test the function via a dedicated ExpressJS testing tool like supertest. You can see a code snippet there to see how it works. Let me know if you have any issues!

All the best,

abe

[Daniel Watrous]

I think what I'm really trying to figure out is what "conv.ask("something");" actually does. Maybe this is out of scope for firebase, but I'm trying to test a dialogflow/actions-on-google app, and I can't figure out how to do it.