No request body in swagger-test

Question

After a long search, I finally found swagger-test to be the best framework to test my REST services from a swagger spec. I followed the read me and the example in the Repo. This is my first xamples request/response pair.

"x-amples": [{
"description": "should save an object",
"request": {
    "params": {
        "app_id": "bengi",
        "table_name": "Student",
        "body": {
            "collectionName": "Student",
            "key": "mLiJB380x9893rjlaf0"
        }
    }
},
"response": {
    "status": 200,
    "headers": {
        "content-type": "application/json"
    }
}}]

app_id and table_name are substituted very well in the url.
My problem is that the parameter body is never included in the http request. I know this because I have inspected the traffic from wireshark.
I am quite sure my specs are very okay because I have been running successful tests manually from Swagger-UI. Here is a screen shot of my console:

Meaning my request is unauthorised due to missing key parameter which is in the request body above.
This is my js.js file called by mocha:

var swaggerTest = require('swagger-test');
var fs = require('fs');
var preq = require('preq');
var swaggerSpec;

var buffer  = fs.readFileSync('cb.json');
    swaggerSpec    = JSON.parse(buffer);
var xamples = swaggerTest.parse(swaggerSpec);


describe('specification-driven tests', function () {
  xamples.forEach(function (xample) {
    it(xample.description, function() {
        this.timeout(10000);
      return preq[xample.request.method](xample.request)
      .then(function (response) {
        assert.deepEqual(response, xample.response);
      });
    });
  });
});

What should I do to ensure that my request body is seen and used by swagger-test?

Answer 1

After several hours of crawling the web and getting no solution, I tried to go through the code and the modules used. This is what I found out that solved my problem:
My x-amples JSON is wrongly formatted, especially where I have placed my body element.
From my question

app_id and table_name are substituted very well in the url.

Well that is because of this line:

 var xamples = swaggerTest.parse(swaggerSpec);

from the test file.

The main function of swagger-test Is to parse the Swagger specification file and extract all x-ample elements into an array as demonstrated by this line:

var xamples = swaggerTest.parse(swaggerSpec);

This means swagger-test does its work perfectly i.e:

1. Retrieve all x-ample extentions into an array.

2. Substitute the values in params element:

   "request": {
       "params": {
           "app_id": "bengi",
           "table_name": "Student",
           "body": {
               "collectionName": "Student",
               "key": "mLiJB380x9893rjlaf0"
           }
       }
   }
   

   into the url template:

e>/data/{app_id}/{table_name}

3. Concatenate the host,basePath and params from the swagger-spec and request JSON to form a complete uri.
   All this is done in this code snippet which does the donkey work in

   function parseXample(spec, uri, method, xample) {
   var uriTemplate = template.parse(uri);
   var expandedUri = uriTemplate.expand(xample.request.params);
   xample.request.method = method;
   xample.request.uri = spec.host + spec.basePath + expandedUri;
   return {
       description: xample.description || method + ' ' + uri,
       request: xample.request,
       response: xample.response
   };
   

   }

From my question:

My problem is that the parameter body is never included in the http request

The trick was in the preq module source code in the getOptions([url],[o],[method]) method.

    if (o.body && o.body instanceof Object) {
        if (o.headers && /^application\/json/.test(o.headers['content-     type'])) {
            o.body = JSON.stringify(o.body);
        } else if (o.method === 'post') {
            o.form = o.body;
            o.body = undefined;
        }
    }

Argument o is options that is the xample.request object passed to preq from my test code: return preqxample.request.method So it becomes clear that xample.request.body was in existent in my request object since it is at xample.request.params.body and consequently the condition if (o.body && o.body instanceof Object) does not pass and hence the assignment o.body=JSON.stringify(o.body) did not happen.
The final x-ample extension should look like this:

"x-amples": [{
    "description": "should save an object",
    "request": {
        "method": "put",
        "uri": "/data/{app_id}/{table_name}",
        "headers": {
            "content-type": "application/json"
        },
        "body": {
            "collectionName": "Student",
            "key": "xxxxxx"
        },
        "params": {
            "app_id": "xxxxxx",
            "table_name": "xxxxxx"
        }
    },
    "response": {
        "status": 200,
        "headers": {
            "content-type": "application/json"
        }
    }
}]

Apart from the location of the body element, you must include the headers element, else you get an error.