How to create a simple API Test¶

API-Tests are usually something, that the classic business people wouldn’t know about. With baangt and a bit of effort it should be possible even for business people to do some simple API-Tests.

As with all tests in baangt also API-Tests are defined in a simple format in MS Excel. See MovieSimpleAPI.xlsx as working example.

Prerequisit for simple API definition format:

Filename must contain the word “api”, otherwise simple format will try to create a browser test run.

Steps to test the simple API Format:¶

Fire up baangt, chose file MovieSimpleApi.XLSX as your run definition. Start the testrun by clicking on the button Execute. After a few seconds you should see the popup “Testrun finished”. Now open the result file baangt_MovieSimpleAPI_<date>.xlsx and see overview and details of the API Test run.

Play around¶

To extend this very simple example you could want to add the field “Actors” to your result sheet. To do so, add one line in the Tab TestStepExecution.

Activity is SAVE
Value is RESULT_Actors
Value2 is $(ANSWER_CONTENT.Actors)

Save the Excel-Sheet. Re-run the test case and you should see the new column “Result_Actors” with the values retrieved from the API.

Activities for API-Tests:¶

(Even though we write all activtities in UPPER CASE, you can write them in any way you like)

Values for Activities for simple API format¶
Activity	Description
`APIURL`	Set’s the main URI/URL for your API-Tests. Could be omitted, if you want to always specify full path in ENDPOINT.
`ENDPOINT`	Set’s the Endpoint-Name for the following API-Call. E.g. if your Endpoint is located at https://app-eu.earthsquad.global/api/rest-auth/login and during this test case execution you’d call a lot of APIs on this server, then you’d set `APIURL` to https://app-eu.earthsquad.global and set `ENDPOINT` to “/api/rest-auth/login”
`POST`	Send a “POST”-Request to the API. Place the content, that you want to send to this endpoint in the column `value`
`GET`	Send a “GET”-Request to the API. URL-Parameters are taken from `APIURL` and `ENDPOINT`. Result is stored for immediate retrieval (see below).
`HEADER`	Set additional parameters for the next API-Calls into the Header. In combination with the special fields (see below) it’s easy to take a result from one API-Request and use it (or parts of it) as input for the next call.
`SAVE`	Save a value from the header or from result to output file (XLSX). `value` is the field-name. If you name it “RESULT_<something>” it is automatically added to the export field list. If you work in API-Simple mode, this is your only chance to get fields added into the result sheet. `value2` is the source (e.g. `$(ANSWER_CONTENT.imdbRating)` would retrieve the value “imdbRating” of the answer of your API-Call.
`ASSERT`	This will retrieve value of element specified by locator And compare with expected_value specified in value if expected_value not matches with output_value it will raise TestStepExecution and result in FAILED.
`ADDRESS_CREATE`	Create Address Data for various test cases and save in testDataDict The following field variable can be used via $(field_name). [‘HouseNumber’, ‘AdditionalData1’, ‘AdditionalData2’, ‘StreetName’, ‘CityName’, ‘PostalCode’, ‘CountryCode’] Example: Default Data: (value=<blank> and value2=<blank>) ‘HouseNumber’: ‘6’, ‘AdditionalData1’: ‘Near MahavirChowk’, ‘AdditionalData2’: ‘Opposite St. Marish Church’, ‘StreetName’: ‘GoreGaon’, ‘CityName’: ‘Ambala’, ‘PostalCode’: ‘160055’, ‘CountryCode’: ‘India’ value optional if provided : (value= {“CountryCode”:”US”,”CityName”:”Athens”} value2=<blank>) FieldValue updated to: {‘HouseNumber’: ‘6’, ‘AdditionalData1’: ‘Near MahavirChowk’, ‘AdditionalData2’: ‘Opposite St. Marish Church’, ‘StreetName’: ‘GoreGaon’, ‘CityName’: ‘Athens’, ‘PostalCode’: ‘160055’, ‘CountryCode’: ‘US’} value2 optional Field will be prefixed with “office_<field_name>”. Ex. “office_CountryCode”

Special data fields in API-Tests:¶

In WEB-Testing you check results either via Assert-Statement or via mapping the text or attribute of an element to a field in the TestDataDictionary. In API-Tests you have some automatic internal variables, that you can use without manually declaring them:

Special Internal Variables in API-Testing¶
Variable	Contents
RESULT_CODE	Result code of the last call to an API. Ideally you’d be able to match result codes as described in here https://restfulapi.net/http-status-codes/, but in the end setting the status code is the job of the developer of the API you’re using - they might follow a different path or simply have bugs.
ANSWER_HEADER	Last Header. You can access a certain part of the header by using $(ANSWER_HEADER.<partName>), so if you want to use the part `login_key` of a header you’d write `$(ANSWER_HEADER.LOGIN_KEY)`
ANSWER_CONTENT	Last content of an API-Call (Post, Get, etc.). Again you can access/extract/replace parts of this content using the “.” like described in the line above (e.g. `$(ANSWER_CONTENT.FRANZI)` to refer to a content part `FRANZI`.