Universal REST testing façade a'la Serenity/JS Web

[jan-molak]

What's the problem you're trying to solve?

At the moment, Serenity/JS provides REST testing capabilities via the @serenity-js/rest module and uses axios under the hood. This is particularly useful in E2E tests for performing data setup/tear down tasks that would've been much slower or impossible to perform via the web UI.

However, some web integration tools, like Playwright Test with its request object also provide a capability to interact with REST APIs, or like WebdriverIO - might provide it in the near future webdriverio/webdriverio#7187

While Serenity/JS REST can be used with Playwright, Protractor, WebdriverIO, or even standalone, it would be nice to reuse the API client provided by Playwright Test so that developers don't have to configure axios from scratch.

How would you like to solve it?

The universal testing façade approach used with Serenity/JS Web could also be applicable here:

• @serenity-js/rest could be made integration tool-agnostic so that it doesn't have a dependency on Axios
• @serenity-js/axios module could be introduced to provide Axios-specific implementation
• @serenity-js/playwright-test module could provide a Playwright-specific implementation compatible with @serenity-js/rest, e.g. CallAnApiWithPlaywright, and provide it automatically to any Serenity/JS actors used with Playwright Test
• @serenity-js/webdriverio module could provide a WebdriverIO-specific implementation

Are there any alternatives?

Developers can continue to use @serenity-js/rest with the standard axios client, and we could provide more docs around setting it up.

How can we make it happen?

• work on this myself (with Serenity/JS team guidance)
• hire the Serenity/JS team to build it for me
• add it to the Serenity/JS backlog and wait for a volunteer

[jan-molak]

There might be an easier way to solve it and avoid introducing new modules; To do that, axios instance used by @serenity-js/rest could be configured automatically by @serenity-js/playwright-test or @serenity-js/webdriverio based on the configuration of their respective web browsers.