How to get Ajax response in HTML Unit (it renders the HTML of the web page)

Question

I have a web application that returns JSON when I make AJAX requests to the server for CRUD operations. The reason of this is because I use jQuery to handle the data without refreshing the page (MVC), so if I create a new entry in the system, the server will return a response which have the created entry in JSON format. jQuery manages the data received and renders the entry on a list (with the previously created entries). Now I am testing it with HTML Unit, but if I try ``` WebResponse response = page.getWebResponse() ``` I get 200 status and message "OK". But I was expecting the JSON data of the entry I created. And if I try ``` page.asText() ``` I get the HTML of the current page (with the entry already in the list, but not the data I want). It is a similar issue than this one, that had no response: Json ajax call returning response 200 ok PD: The jQuery form has two fields, one is a text input for the name and another is a select for the car settings. I pass to this function a list…

Accepted Answer

I had a similar problem and found a solution using the HtmlUnit FAQ page:

You can subclass HttpWebConnection and override getResponse() as:

```
   new WebConnectionWrapper(webClient) {

public WebResponse getResponse(WebRequest request) throws IOException {
           WebResponse response = super.getResponse(request);
           if (request.getUrl().toExternalForm().contains("my_url")) {
               String content = response.getContentAsString("UTF-8");

//change content

WebResponseData data = new WebResponseData(content.getBytes("UTF-8"),
                       response.getStatusCode(), response.getStatusMessage(), >response.getResponseHeaders());
               response = new WebResponse(data, request, response.getLoadTime());
           }
           return response;
       }
   };
```

What this means is that we can wrap our webClient object, intercept any request and response we need, extract them or make changes.

I made an inner class which extends WebConnectionWrapper, and has one field which is JSON I need:

```
private class JsonResponseWebWrapper extends WebConnectionWrapper{

public JsonResponseWebWrapper(WebClient webClient){
        super(webClient);           
    }
    
    String jsonResponse;
    
    @Override
    public WebResponse getResponse(WebRequest request) throws IOException {;
        WebResponse response = super.getResponse(request);
        //extract JSON from response
        jsonResponse = response.getContentAsString();
        return response;
    }

public String getJsonResponse() {
        return jsonResponse;
    }
};
```

This way we will intercept every single response. But first we need to wrap the webClient. I did this just before requesting JSON response, so I didn't have to add conditions to my wrapper:

```
JsonResponseWebWrapper jrww = new JsonResponseWebWrapper(webClient);
page = button.click();
String rawJSON = jrww.getJsonResponse();
```

And after that you can parse it using your favorite JSON parser. Hope this helps!

How to get Ajax response in HTML Unit (it renders the HTML of the web page)

Solution

Problem