How to pass POST params in test?

[asonnenschein]

Howdy! I'm building a REST API w/ falcon and am trying to write a POST test that spoofs an HTML form and can't quite figure out what I'm doing wrong here.

In this example -

class TestBase(unittest.TestCase):

    def setUp(self):
        self.app = server.server
        self.srmock = falcon.testing.StartResponseMock()

    def simulate_request(self, path, **kwargs):
        env = falcon.testing.create_environ(path=path, **kwargs)
        return self.app(env, self.srmock)

    def simulate_post(self, *args, **kwargs):
        kwargs['method'] = 'POST'
        return self.simulate_request(*args, **kwargs)


class TestRegister(TestBase):

    def setUp(self):
        super(TestRegister, self).setUp()
        self.entry_path = '/register/'

    def tearDown(self):
        super(TestRegister, self).tearDown()

    def test_register_user(self):
        body = {
            'username': 'new_user',
            'email': 'email',
            'password': 'password',
            'location': 'Tucson, AZ'
        }
        self.simulate_post(self.entry_path, body=body)
        self.assertEqual(self.srmock.status, falcon.HTTP_201)

The test fails with this error:

TypeError: a bytes-like object is required, not 'dict'

If I pass the body in as a string literal instead of a dict(), I don't get any errors but the request doesn't parse out the body as params - I've got to parse the body manually via req.stream.read().

[asonnenschein]

OK, figured this one out - I had a look at the pytest-falcon code by @yohanboniface and figured out what I was doing wrong here. I didn't add the correct 'Content-Type' header and I didn't encode the body!

from urllib.parse import urlencode

class TestRegister(TestBase):

    def setUp(self):
        super(TestRegister, self).setUp()
        self.entry_path = '/register/'

    def tearDown(self):
        super(TestRegister, self).tearDown()

    def test_register_user(self):
        body = urlencode({
            'username': 'new_user',
            'email': 'email',
            'password': 'password',
            'location': 'Tucson, AZ'
        })
        headers = {"Content-Type": "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"}
        self.simulate_post(self.entry_path, body=body, headers=headers)
        self.assertEqual(self.srmock.status, falcon.HTTP_201)

[kiddten]

Thanks. That is helpful!