Hi, I work for Salesforce and I recently came acro...

# http4k

[Gopal S Akshintala]

Hi, I work for Salesforce and I recently came across this amazing toolkit and wish to use http4k to build a companion for our Functional Tests. I am looking for help to discuss my idea and understand if http4k is the right fit for my use-cases and idiomatic ways to achieve it. Please excuse this lengthy post.

Ours is a REST service that takes JSON input. The steps in a typical Functional test are:
1. Start the server (This is common for all tests)
2. Setup user permissions
3. Create test data in the DB
4. Build JSON programmatically with:
- Ids of DB entries created in 3
- Some specific values for the test
- Some default values
5. Call API through a ConnectClient (written contextually for our services, which internally uses apache commons-httpclient).
6. Unmarshall response programmatically
7. Validate

Now I attempt to simplify this process for 3,4,5,6,7 by outsourcing them to a library I wanna build. The idea is:
3,4 - The developer provides a JSON file with some variables (similar to Postman variables) and I wish to create test data reading them. I am planning to use lens to read and validate this input JSON for type-safety.
5 - I want to reuse our existing ConnectClient. How can I integrate this with http4k? (like JavaHttpClient)
6 - I want to use Lens again to validate response for type-safety or unmarshal to a POJO.
7 - The developer wants to assert it against a JSON resource. Is there something like JsonApprovalTest which doesn’t need a test runner? He also wants to assert individual field values. Is there any tool from the http4k toolkit that can help?

Also if I am missing any awesome http4k tool which can help in this flow, please let me know. Thanks!