Play 2.1: unit testing EssentialActions

playframework-2.1, specs2, unit-testing

Solution

An essential action is a `RequestHeader => Iteratee[Indata, Result]`, you can apply it to `FakeRequest` since it implements `RequestHeader`. To actually execute the iteratee you either stuff it with data or just tell it right away that there is no more indata. For both those cases you get a `Future[Result]` back which you need to wait for in the tests.

So, for a simple GET with no request body (using the play test helper await method) you could do it like this:

val iteratee = controllers.SomeController.action()(FakeRequest())
val result: Result = await(iteratee.run)

If you want to do requests with request bodies you will have to do some more stuff to be able to feed the request body to the iteratee and also take care of encoding data your indata correctly.

Problem

I want to unit test a controller method that returns an `EssentialAction`. I pass a `FakeRequest` to it, and get back a `Iteratee[Array[Byte], Result]`. It looks like the test helpers `contentAsString`, `contentType` and `status` do not accept this result type. Is there an implicit conversion I am missing? Is there an example somewhere of controllers being unit tested without bringing up an entire `FakeApplication`?

Original source