I am writing a web service in node, and testing it with Postman. I spent a long timing looking for an error. When I finally found it, it turned out to be a simple error formatting the response body, which is json.
If I leave off the final brace in the response body, Postman waits for two minutes, and then reports that it received everything, just fine.
If I leave off the closing quote in the last value in the json, Postman says the server didn't respond, perhaps I should check my security certificates.
I would much rather Postman said "Hey, Buddy, you left off a quote!"
If there some validation service I can talk to? Or a plugin in Postman?
Here there are some validation javascript libraries, you can use:
Validator provides a declarative way of validating javascript objects.
Express-validator acts as an express.js middleware for node-validator.
Meanwhile, Postman got API testing and Collection Runner that can help you through this; which you can write some pre-request script as well as test script for each request.
Also, they got Newman which is a command-line collection runner. It allows you to effortlessly run and test a Postman collection directly from the command-line. It is built with extensibility in mind so that you can easily integrate it with your continuous integration servers and build systems.
I found that Paw worked (https://paw.cloud/). And so far I haven't paid for it.
Where Postman said "check your security certificates," Paw said "we were expecting 376 bytes but you only sent us 312."
Cuts down my time solving the problem a lot!
I use Fiddler for this. It is very good at identifying (with an error message that pops up) problems and bad implementations of the HTTP protocol. Browse the web with it running, and within a few minutes you'll undoubtedly hit a poorly implemented server.
Postman won't be able to handle these cases since it's insulated from poor behavior by the browser's framework.
That's not your problem though.
When I finally found it, it turned out to be a simple error formatting the response body, which is json.
That has absolutely nothing to do with HTTP. HTTP doesn't know or care what your request/response bodies are.
The problem you face is that your API endpoint could be returning whatever it wants. You need a custom solution to your problem, as there is no standard API server in this case.
Most folks will run unit tests that hit common endpoints of your service to ensure they're alive and well.
I should also point out that it should be all but impossible for you to break the JSON response if you're doing it correctly. Sounds like you're serializing JSON manually... never do that, we have JSON serializers for this purpose. Send in an object and let it worry about building the JSON output for you. Otherwise, you'll waste a lot of time on problems like these.
Related
I'm working on a codebase that attempts to make a REST call to a remote service, which returns JSON. The call works fine when it gets normal JSON back. In some cases, like when the network blows up, it gets back HTML, which tries to report various network problems.
Our error handling code in the client needs to deal properly with this situation, which is defined as simply obtaining the HTML string and logging it.
I find it's a little hard to write an automated test for this.
In our client code, we use ClientBuilder.newBuilder()... , then call "build()", which returns the Client, and then we call "client.target(url)" and then move forward with getting the response. We have an exception handler that will attempt to read the raw text.
In a test for this kind of thing, I'm used to using the CXF JAXRSServerFactoryBean class to run a server. I know how to connect the client to the server, but I'm not sure what to configure in the server to allow me to return arbitrary text, instead of a "resource class".
It's also possible that using JAXRSServerFactoryBean is overkill for this, as it just needs to return plain text.
What are my options here?
Update:
I did make progress setting up a test using JAXRSServerFactoryBean, but I'm still wondering if there are other options, especially ones that mitigate the next problem that I discovered, described at Using javax.ws.rs.client.ClientBuilder in CXF to create Client, any route to be able to use local transport? .
Update:
I gave up on the JAXRSServerFactoryBean approach, as I don't need to test the network, and doing so adds additional complications. The JAX-RS filter approach is simpler and avoids those complications. See the above linked question for details.
I have an API that produces JSON like this:
)]}',
{
//JSON DATA
}
The //JSON DATA is valid JSON, but the )]}', up top is not.
When I try to GET this data via a Logic App, I get:
BadRequest. Http request failed: the content was not a valid JSON.
So, a few related questions:
1) Can I tell the logic app to return the invalid JSON anyway?
2) How can debug the issue better? I happen to know that the response is invalid, but what if I didn't? Can I see the raw data somewhere?
3) This is all done via the Azure web portal. Are there better tools? Visual Studio?
I should also mention that if I call a route on the same API that returns XML instead of JSON, then the Logic App works fine. So it definitely doesn't like the JSON response in particular.
Thanks!
First of all, please do not post three questions as a single question.
Question 1). The best thing you can do is make the API return a valid JSON object. This is good for million reasons. Here're a few:
it's pretty much a standard (either valid JSON or XML -- yeah, old school way);
therefore, no users of this API (including you) will need to struggle and guess what's going on and why;
your Logic App's step will just work without adding extra complexity;
you will make this world and your karma better.
If API-side changes are not within your reach, I don't think you can do much. If you're lucky and the HTTP action is successful (Status Code 2xx), you can try to use a Query Action with a function that truncates the first characters. It will look something like this (I don't know the exact syntax): #Substring(body('myHttpGet'), 4, length(body('myHttpGet')) - 4) where myHttpGet is the id of the Http Get action.
However, once again, if possible, I strongly recommend fixing up the API which is the root cause of the problem, instead of dealing with garbage response after that.
UPDATE Another thing you can do is wrap the dirty API. For example, you could create a trivial Azure Function that invokes the API you don't directly control, and sanitizes the response for you consumption requirements. This Azure Function function should be easy to call from the Logic App. It costs almost nothing (unless we're talking millions of requests/month). The only drawback here is the increasing latency, which may be not an issue at all -- test it and see whether it adds less than 100ms or so... Oh, and don't forget to file a ticket with the API owner, they make our world a bad place!
Question 2) In Azure Logic App web UI you can Look into the execution details and the error will definitely be there.
Question 3) You're asking for a tool recommendation which is by definition a highly subjective thing and is off-topic on StackOverflow.
TL/DR: The other app is not producing valid JSON.
Meaning, this is not a problem for you to solve. The other app has to return valid JSON if the owner claims it should.
If they cannot or will not produce valid JSON, then the first thing you need to do is inform your management that you will have to spend a lot of extra time accommodating their non-standard format.
I am working on a JSON project and I basically want to hit on some specified URL with some request and get the response back. I want to know if there are some sites available that can provide me help for request, response on JSON?
Any sort of help is welcome!
Back when "Ajax" was being coined (and well before), we often used the XML HTTP Request object (W3 Schools) but web development is more mature now. Libraries such as jQuery wrap this functionality for easy use (jQuery Ajax)
I have a simple RESTful web service and I wish to test the PUT method on a certain resource. I would like to do it in the most simple way using as few additional tools as possible.
For instance, testing the GET method of a resource is the peak of simplicity - just going to the resource URL in the browser. I understand that it is impossible to reach the same level of simplicity when testing a PUT method.
The following two assumptions should ease the task:
The request body is a json string prepared beforehand. Meaning, whatever is the solution to my problem it does not have to compose a json string from the user input - the user input is the final json string.
The REST engine I use (OpenRasta) understands certain URL decorators, which tell it what is the desired HTTP method. Hence I can issue a POST request, which would be treated as a PUT request inside the REST engine. This means, regular html form can be used to test the PUT action.
However, I wish the user to be able to enter the URL of the resource to be PUT to, which makes the task more complicated, but eases the testing.
Thanks to all the good samaritans out there in advance.
P.S.
I have neither PHP nor PERL installed, but I do have python. However, staying within the realm of javascript seems to be the simplest approach, if possible. My OS is Windows, if that matters.
I'd suggest using the Poster add-on for Firefox. You can find it over here.
As well as providing a means to inspect HTTP requests coming from desktop and web applications, Fiddler allows you to create arbitrary HTTP requests (as well as resend ones that were previously sent by an application).
It is browser-agnostic.
I use the RESTClient firefox plugin (you can not use an URL for the message body but at least you can save your request) but also would recommend curl on the command line.
Maybe you should also have a look at this SO question.
New here. I've searched quite a bit for a working solution to my problem, but even though I have found posts with promising titles, none of the solutions have worked.
I am deploying an MVC2 web app to a client's server.
I did my development on Win2k8 Server, but they are running Win2k3 sever.
The app's only purpose is to receive some record ID information as HTTP parameters, check in the database for the status of the given record or records, and then return the status information as a simple string such as "Completed" or "Incomplete" in JSON format.
This getJSON code works fine in the development environment.
Inexplicably to me, on the client's server, the getJSON request receives a null response from the application.
There is no cross-domain action AFAIK... the result is the same from the client's server or from my machine via VPN.
In the MVC model's Json code, a common solution for people is to add the "JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet" attribute to the Json result being returned. I did this long before trying to deploy it, and as I said, it has worked fine in the dev environment.
Using Firebug, I have watched the same request URL get sent to both my local server and the client server - the response headers from both servers are the same, but the response content from my server is shown as:
{"Result":"No Data"}
Which is what I want.
There is literally no content shown in the response from the client's server..? But the request gets an HTTP 200 code and is recorded as a success in the reponse's status attribute.
The response header content type in both situations is "application/json"
But wait, there is more!
If I manually enter the request to each server in the Firefox nav bar, and hit enter, in both cases it responds with:
{"Result":"No Data"}
Which is what I want. So why can I get the result I want from the MVC app on the client's server only when I hand-enter the request URL in Firefox, but not from the Javascript code?
I have tried forcing different output content types ... using the jQuery ajaxSetup method...
$.ajaxSetup({
async: false,
dataType: 'text'
});
or
$.ajaxSetup({
async: false,
dataType: 'html'
});
and again wtih 'script', and 'json'. I also tried the conversion options such as 'text json' or 'html json' or 'json text' and so forth.
Some of the posts I'm reading, and my gut feeling, though, suggest the problem is not the jQuery code making the request that is at fault... I don't see how the same jQuery request point to a different server running the same app would suddenly cause that server to send back a 'null' value.
By null, I want to be clear... I mean nothing is sent. There is no {} or {null} or any sign of JSON... just blank whiteness of non-existence :P
Even if nobody knows the answer, I would love some input perhaps suggesting where I should focus my sleuthing ... client or server?
If the problem is the server, it seems hard to really know that the MVC stuff is running 100% on the IIS6 server, but in general it seems to work. I have a different MVC app running on the client server which responds to the virtual paths, and generally runs the same as on dev machine.
I have found one thing ... the request headers are somewhat different? The Request Headers sent to the IIS7 setup include an "X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest", "referrer" , and "cookie" field/value.
I could guess that the lack of the "X-requested-with: XMLHttpRequest" in the IIS6 request headers is a clue, but I do not see then how the same javascript code pointing at a different server can generate different request headers itself. So how else are those being generated?
The javascript is embedded in an ASP.NET page, btw.
Oooh.. frustration!
Thanks for any input.
Odd Progress ... apparently there is some sort of issue with IIS6 handling the query. Although I have not payed any attention to JSONP, a post elsewhere suggested that sometimes use the "&callback=?" parameter at the end of a .getJSON request URL would force it into GET mode and that worked frequently for problems getting data from the server. So I did that... and it did work, sort of. The proper {"Result":"No Data"} was returned in response to the request... which seems good. However, the way that the JSONP callback works, it generates its own script to do the calling and fetching and interpreting of the incoming JSON. In this case, it interprets the JSON to need a label which it does not have, thus an error is thrown "invalid label" ... there must be some way to hack things to just deliver the JSON, but the whole required use of JSONP callbacks suggests that the server configuration is wrong, right? Or why does it work without JSONP for IIS7 and not IIS6?
Despite my not liking the callback JSONP solution, it appears to work ok. The error is still returned about an invalid label, but that does not appear to stop the remaining javascript from running... and so the application is working with IIS6 now. I have not tested the fix of using the callbacks and JSONP against IIS7 yet, but I expect it will work well enough.
Here is a link to the discussion that lead me to my current solution. I do still hope to find a more elegant solution, however.
NeoWin.net
Are you certain that your App Extension Mappings are set up correct?
Follow this article for running MVC2 on IIS6 and ensure all the different configurations have been done, that's probably the first step before going further and investigating specifics.
I'm really inclined to believe it's related to HTTP Verbs.