Stub a Post Request for Successful Form Submission with Cypress

Instructor: [00:00] Here, I have a brand new spec file defined that has a describe. We're going to be testing form submission. I have a single empty test adds a new to-do item. Let's write our test to submit a new to-do item, and assert that our application behaves the way we expect it to.

[00:15] Let's start by just defining the text that we're going to type into the input. We'll define a new constant. I'll call this newTodo. This is just going to contain the string "Buy milk." Submitting this form is going to make a post request. We want to stub that out.

[00:30] Let's do cy.route. We're going to define route passing in an options object this time. Our method is going to be post. Our URL will be the /api/todos endpoint. We're going to stub the response.

[00:51] This is going to be an object which we'll give an ID. It'll have a name, which is going to be newTodo. Then, it's going to have a default isComplete set to false. Then, we're going to tack on an as. We'll call this save. This way, we can wait for it to respond. With that set up, let's visit our application and submit our form.

[01:17] We'll start with a cy.seedAndVisit using a custom command. Once we've visited our page, we're going to use cy.get to get our input. We'll do that with our class of newTodo. Once I have my input, I want to type into it.

[01:36] I'm going to use the type command. I'm going to pass it in a string that I want typed into the input. In this case, it's going to be that newTodo constant. I also want to issue a second type command. This time I'm going to pass it the string "enter" inside curly braces. This is going to issue the enter key in that input.

[01:55] At this point, I expect the application to make that post request that we stubbed up top. I'm going to call cy.wait, passing it save prefixed with the @ symbol. Once we get a response from that post, then I want to make some assertions about the state of our application.

[02:13] Once we've had a successful post with our item, we expect that item to be added to our list. Let's use cy.get to get all of our list items. We'll use the class named todoList to get the top-level UL and then LI to get all the LIs.

[02:30] We'll make our assertion with a should. We'll say it should have the length of five. We know we can assert that it has a length of five, because the default behavior for seedAndVisit is to seed our application with the data from our fixture. Our fixture has four to-dos in it.

[02:51] Now, we can save this file. We can go into the Cypress UI. We can run our form submission spec. We're going to get an error, cy.route cannot be invoked before starting the cy.server.

[03:08] Let's switch back to our code. Up at the top of our test, before our call to cy.route, we'll do cy.server. We can save it. Switch back. We'll see that this has run and everything has passed.

[03:24] We've successfully automated the process of loading up our page, entering a new to-do into our form, submitting that form, and verifying that our UI behaves as expected for the given network responses.