Acceptance tests in ember for beginners 1

When I started creating an app with ember I didn't think about testing it. But as the app grew steadily the pains for making mistakes got obvious. So I thought: let's try to begin testing. I had some basic unit tests in place. But that was not enough. Because the most basic things as the possibility to login failed to work.

So I tried to create some acceptance tests. This describes the journey of new knowledge I gained doing this. I assume you have your app in place and are using ember-cli

First the basic command to create the boilerplate for a test in ember-cli ember g acceptance-test login. This will create a new file inside tests/acceptance/ named login-test.js. with the following content

import Ember from 'ember';
import { module, test } from 'qunit';
import startApp from 'yourapp/tests/helpers/start-app';

var application;

module('Acceptance | asd', {
  beforeEach: function() {
    application = startApp();
  },

  afterEach: function() {
    Ember.run(application, 'destroy');
  }
});

test('visiting /login', function(assert) {
  visit('/login');

  andThen(function() {
    assert.equal(currentURL(), '/login');
  });
});

Nothing special here. ember-cli tries to open the url /login and assert whether it is on this page. In my app the login is located directly at the index page so I changed it to visit('/'); Ember has some nice test helpers. So one could use fillIn to enter username/email and password and click to send the data to the server through a action. The middle part of the test then would look like this:

test('visiting / and trying to login', function(assert) {
  visit('/');
  fillIn('.header .login-email', 'mytest@email.com');
  fillIn('.header .login-pw', 'testPW');
  click('.header .login-btn');
  andThen(function() {
    //this should run after being loggedIn
    assert.equal(currentURL(), '/');
  });
});

But I got the error

Assertion failed: You have turned on testing mode, which disabled the run-loop's autorun. You will need to wrap any code with asynchronous side-effects in an Ember.run

How to fix that will be in the next part of this series of learning to test ember. The next part will be released in 3-4 days.