Supertest: How to send multiple requests without nesting?

[nareshbhatia]

I would like to send multiple requests sequentially in the beore() method of my test. How do I do this without deeply nesting the code. This is what I have right now:

describe('Conf Test', function() {
    this.timeout(5000);

    before(function(done) {
        sequelize.sync({
            force: true
        }).then(
            function() {
                request(app)
                    .post('/albums')
                    .send({name: 'Beatles'})
                    .set('Accept', 'application/json')
                    .end(function() {
                        request(app)
                            .post('/albums')
                            .send({name: 'Deep Purple'})
                            .set('Accept', 'application/json')
                            .end(function() {
                                done();
                            });
                    });
            }
        );
    });

[tj]

can't really, joys of node's callbacks. even if you could string them along it would be troublesome because then you cant use any response information for the next requests. This is a fundamental node fail really, generators will help but we'll have to add gen support to supertest at some point

[nareshbhatia]

Would it help if the methods returned a promise? Just like the sequelize.sync() method above.

[tj]

not really, you'd still have to use .then() and a callback

[nareshbhatia]

Hi @visionmedia, I was able to use async to remove the deep nesting. My code is definitely more readable now. What do you think of using such utitlities with supertest?

describe('Album Test', function() {
    this.timeout(5000);

    before(function(done) {
        async.series([

            // Sync the database - sequelize.sync()
            function(callback) {
                domain.sequelize.sync({
                    force: true
                }).then(function(/* models */) {
                    callback(null, null);
                });
            },

            // Create an album
            function(callback) {
                request(app)
                    .post('/albums')
                    .send({name: 'Beatles'})
                    .set('Accept', 'application/json')
                    .end(callback);
            },

            // Create another album
            function(callback) {
                request(app)
                    .post('/albums')
                    .send({name: 'Deep Purple'})
                    .set('Accept', 'application/json')
                    .end(callback);
            }
        ], done);
    });
    ...
}

[tj]

sounds fine to me! Use whatever works for you

[chovy]

what do you think of supertest-as-promised?

https://github.com/WhoopInc/supertest-as-promised

Is it any good?