Hi all,
I wanted to bring awareness to a potential improvement in the integration
tests within Fineract.
I bet all of us have seen the difficulty with them. When dealing with API
calls, there are raw Map types everywhere. We don't know if there's gonna
be an integer there, a String, a long or what; we don't know what
properties will be there in a certain response; and the worst thing is, we
don't know if it's in line with the actual implementation.
Just to give you an idea:
HashMap accountDetails =
FixedDepositAccountHelper.getFixedDepositAccountById(...);
Float maturityAmount =
Float.valueOf(accountDetails.get("maturityAmount").toString());
Very difficult to maintain. While I was fixing a bug around Client Address
creation, I thought I could do it better and in a typesafe manner.
So, I had this idea to utilize the fineract-client module that has
generated request/response models based on the APIs we have in Fineract.
And while fixing the bug, I used the generated code to write 2 integration
tests to cover the bugfixes. It's way more easier than dealing with Maps;
and there's one additional benefit to this approach.
Even though fineract-client is another module people can use when
integrating with Fineract, we are not testing it and it's definitely a gap.
If I ask whether the fineract-client module is usable and working as
expected, I don't think most of us will have a reliable answer because
there's literally no automation in place to test those models. And that's
the great thing about using the client module in integration tests as well
because on one hand we're testing the Fineract functionality we want to and
through those tests, we are testing the fineract-client module as well.
Here's the 2 tests:
-
https://github.com/apache/fineract/blob/develop/integration-tests/src/test/java/org/apache/fineract/integrationtests/ClientTest.java#L219
-
https://github.com/apache/fineract/blob/develop/integration-tests/src/test/java/org/apache/fineract/integrationtests/ClientTest.java#L250
Long story short, I think it would be really nice if everybody would use
the client module for future integration tests because there's no downside
to it but will ensure easier maintainability while making sure the client
module is compatible with the REST API.
Hope that makes sense.
Let me know your thoughts.
Best,
Arnold
