Error vs Fatal in tests
go
Solution
I think you use `Error` until continuing to run the test can't possibly give you any more information useful in debugging, then you use `Fatal`. And if you're not sure (like if you're writing a factored-out method like `CodeIs` to be used in the context of lots of different tests), go for `Error`, since you're generally not doing harm by continuing to run the test.
By that criteria, it makes sense for you to `Fatal` at failed JSON decoding after which, as you say, nothing interesting is going to happen. And it's understandable that `CodeIs` and `ContentTypeIsJson` use `Error` because they're methods that are going to be used across different tests.
A different example might better illustrate why to use `Error` until you know nothing else interesting will happen: say you want to sanity-check several different things about the JSON response, and any subset them could be wrong. (Like, your product API could return `price` using the wrong type, or it could fail to return empty `description`s when you don't want that, or...) Using `Error` instead of `Fatal` for each check means your test will always run them all and report which ones failed.
Problem
I am developing a JSON web service using Go-Json-Rest. I am writing tests. ``` ... recorded = test.RunRequest(t, &api.Handler, test.MakeSimpleRequest("POST", "http://localhost/api/products", product)) recorded.CodeIs(201) recorded.ContentTypeIsJson() var newProduct Product err := recorded.DecodeJsonPayload(&newProduct) if err != nil { t.Fatal(err) } ... ``` I am using `Fatal` as I am coming from Python world where an `assert` would immediately stop test case method execution. And this make sense: why trying to decode the data, if it's not JSON? But `recorded.CodeIs(201)`, `recorded.ContentTypeIsJson()` and other tests I've seen use `Error` which doesn't stop test execution. What should I use in tests? `Error` or `Fatal`?