How to send raw post data in a Rails functional test?

Question

I\'m looking to send raw post data (e.g. unparamaterized JSON) to one of my controllers for testing:

class LegacyOrderUpdateControllerTest < ActionControl         


        

Answer 1

Looking at stack trace running a test you can acquire more control on request preparation: ActionDispatch::Integration::RequestHelpers.post => ActionDispatch::Integration::Session.process => Rack::Test::Session.env_for

You can pass json string as :params AND specify a content type "application/json". In other case content type will be set to "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" and your json will be parsed properly.

So all you need is to specify "CONTENT_TYPE":

post :index, '{"foo":"bar", "bool":true}', "CONTENT_TYPE" => 'application/json'

Answer 2

Version for Rails 5:

post :create, body: '{"foo": "bar", "bool": true}'

See here - body string parameter is treated as raw request body.

Answer 3

For those using Rails5+ integration tests, the (undocumented) way to do this is to pass a string in the params argument, so:

post '/path', params: raw_body, headers: { 'Content-Type' => 'application/json' }

Answer 4

The post method expects a hash of name-value pairs, so you'll need to do something like this:

post :index, :data => '{"foo":"bar", "bool":true}'

Then, in your controller, get the data to be parsed like this:

post_data = params[:data]

Answer 5

As of Rails 4.1.5, this was the only thing that worked for me:

class LegacyOrderUpdateControllerTest < ActionController::TestCase
  def setup
    @request.headers["Content-Type"] = 'application/json'
  end

  test "sending json" do
    post :index, '{"foo":"bar", "bool":true}'.to_json, { account_id: 5, order_id: 10 }
  end
end

for a url at /accounts/5/orders/10/items. This gets the url params conveyed as well as the JSON body. Of course, if orders is not embedded then you can leave off the params hash.

class LegacyOrderUpdateControllerTest < ActionController::TestCase
  def setup
    @request.headers["Content-Type"] = 'application/json'
  end

  test "sending json" do
    post :index, '{"foo":"bar", "bool":true}'.to_json
  end
end

Answer 6

I ran across the same issue today and found a solution.

In your test_helper.rb define the following method inside of ActiveSupport::TestCase:

def raw_post(action, params, body)
  @request.env['RAW_POST_DATA'] = body
  response = post(action, params)
  @request.env.delete('RAW_POST_DATA')
  response
end

In your functional test, use it just like the post method but pass the raw post body as the third argument.

class LegacyOrderUpdateControllerTest < ActionController::TestCase
  test "sending json" do
    raw_post :index, {}, {:foo => "bar", :bool => true}.to_json
  end
end

I tested this on Rails 2.3.4 when reading the raw post body using

request.raw_post

instead of

request.body.read

If you look at the source code you'll see that raw_post just wraps request.body.read with a check for this RAW_POST_DATA in the request env hash.