Match specific fields in a JSON (ignoring the others)

[javierseixas]

Hello! Given a JSON like this:

{
    "id": "@string@",
    "title": "My Title",
    "short_description": "@string@",
    "campaign_start": "@string@",
    "campaign_end": "@string@",
    "status": "@integer@",
    "_links": "@wildcard@",
    "_embedded": {
        "account": {
            "id": "@string@",
            "name": "@string@",
            "society_name": "@string@",
            "_links": "@wildcard@"
        }
    }
}

I would like to check that title equals to "My Title", but I don't care about the other fields. There is any way to ignore them?
I want to do that because the structure of the expected JSON is already tested before, so if I could write something like following would make my features cleaner and focused on what I'm testing each scenario.

What I'm figuring out would be like this:

{
    "title": "My title",
    "@whatever@"
}

[norberttech]

Hello @javierseixas
Unfortunately we dont have such feature yet. Thanks for reporting this use case we are going to think about it as soon as possible,

[piotrjura]

+1

[benbor]

+1

[norberttech]

What I'm thinking about is a simple @JSON@ type pattern. It would match any string that is valid json.
We could also create "with" expander to cooperate with that patter. This would give us possiblity to create following patterns:

$json = <<<JSON
{
    "id": "12314",
    "title": "My Title",
    "short_description": "Lorem ips",
    "campaign_start": "01-01-2014",
    "campaign_end": "01-02.2014"
}
JSON;

$matcher->match($json, "@json@.with('title', 'My Title')"); 

I'm only not sure about the "with" expander name, need to think a bit more about that.

[javierseixas]

This "with" expander would be interesting. What happens if I would want to match not only the first level of the json, but the embedded as well?

{
    "title": "My Title",
    "_embedded": {
        "account": {
            "name": "foo",
            "@whatever@"
        }
    },
    "@whatever@"
}

I know that this @whatever@ pattern would break the php json_decode function, so it would requires to think another option, or think about a customized json_decode function for this library.

[norberttech]

Indeed json_decode is a failure point for this @whatever@ type pattern. Also @whatever@ type patter is a bit too generic but...
First argument for "with" expander could be "path", not a field name and this was my first intention but obviously I didn't make it clear enough.
So in order to check following example:

{
    "title": "My Title",
    "_embedded": {
        "account": {
            "name": "foo",
            "@whatever@"
        }
    },
    "@whatever@"
}

We could create a following pattern:

$matcher->match($json, "@json@.with('title', 'My Title').with('_embedded.account.name', 'foo'"); 

or when there will be more than one account:

{
    "title": "My Title",
    "_embedded": {
        "accounts": 
         [
            {
              "name": "foo",
              "@whatever@"
           }
        ]
    },
    "@whatever@"
}

$matcher->match($json, "@json@.with('title', 'My Title').with('_embedded.accounts[0].name', 'foo'"); 

So the $path argument for the "with" expander would simply take "." character when accessing objects and "[n]" when accessing arrays.
This should give us possibility to check as many elements as we need in @JSON@ object.

[javierseixas]

@norzechowicz please, see above my pull request. I think it would solve my requirements out of the box, without need to have any @whatever@ mark, neither expanders.
The Behat feature file would remain clean with perfect legibility.