Functional Web Services Testing Made Easy with SoapUI - Part 2

Part 1 of this series helped provide the background needed to begin exploring web services testing. We learned the basics of SoapUI and how easy it was to write functional tests without writing a single line of code. We also saw how to add assertions to these tests. What we will examine now is how to use Groovy within SoapUI for test setup, test teardown, response validation, and much, much more.

Before we begin, a quick Groovy primer. We start with the fact that Groovy is Java and Java is Groovy. If you have written Java code, you have written Groovy code. Our tasks within this article will be to do 3 things: format a date, read and write to a properties file, and parse XML. Let’s look at the Groovy code for each of these in detail.

1. Format a date
The standard Java class for this task is SimpleDateFormat. This is a concrete subclass of DateFormat formats and parses dates and times using a string pattern, in our case, "yyyy-MM-dd". Let’s start by writing this in Java; later we will see how easily we can groovify this to use within SoapUI. Here is the Java code to get the date in the format “yyyy-MM-dd”.

java.util.Date today = new java.util.Date();
java.text.SimpleDateFormat sdf = new java.text.SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd");
String todayStr = sdf.format(today);

We could leave the Groovy code exactly as it is above, but let’s make it groovier, removing the bells and whistles necessary in Java. Our code finally looks like this:

today = new Date()
sdf = new java.text.SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd")
todayStr = sdf.format(today)

Not a lot of change, but considerably faster to type. The similarities to Java are just as we have said.

2. Reading and writing to a properties file

The java.util.Properties object does the work of reading and writing to a properties file in Java. This time we’ll go directly to the Groovy code:

sdf = new java.text.SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd")
todayStr = sdf.format(new Date())
props = new java.util.Properties ()
file = new File("C:/web-services-test/testprops.txt")
if(!file.exists())
{
file.createNewFile()
props.today = todayStr
props.zipCode = "20904"
fos = new java.io.FileOutputStream ( file )
props.store(fos, "Writing the zipcode and today's date")
}fis = new FileInputStream (file )
props.load (fis)
today = props.getProperty ( "today" )
zipCode = props.getProperty ( "zipCode" ) 

Simple, right? Similarly, if you need to read from a database, you can do so in a few simple lines of Groovy code.

3.Parse XML

If you have been writing enterprise Java applications you have certainly needed to use XML, and you can testify that XML and Java is not easy. Parsing XML in Java requires a lot of boilerplate code and is really tedious.

You may remember from part 1 that I said I was lazy. Fortunately, Groovy comes to the rescue. We can parse XML in just 5 lines of code. Yes, that’s what I said, just 5 lines. Let’s see how to parse the response from the LatLonListZipCode web service from Part 1. The XML looks like this:

<SOAP-ENV:Envelope SOAP-ENV:encodingStyle="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/" xmlns:SOAP-ENV="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:SOAP-ENC="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/">
   <SOAP-ENV:Body>
      <ns1:LatLonListZipCodeResponse xmlns:ns1="http://www.weather.gov/forecasts/xml/DWMLgen/wsdl/ndfdXML.wsdl">
         <listLatLonOut xsi:type="xsd:string"><?xml version='1.0' ?>
<dwml version='1.0' xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="http://www.nws.noaa.gov/mdl/survey/pgb_survey/dev/DWMLgen/schema/DWML.xsd">
<latLonList>39.0138,-77.0242</latLonList>
</dwml></listLatLonOut>
      </ns1:LatLonListZipCodeResponse>
   </SOAP-ENV:Body>
</SOAP-ENV:Envelope>

The code to parse this in Groovy is so easy:

groovyUtils = new com.eviware.soapui.support.GroovyUtils( context )
holder = groovyUtils.getXmlHolder("LatLonListZipCode - Request 1#Response")
listLatLonOut = holder.getNodeValue( "//listLatLonOut" )
latlonNode = groovyUtils.getXmlHolder(listLatLonOut)
latlon = latlonNode.getNodeValue("//latLonList")

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