How to get the response after a POST request in Ca

Question

I have this very simple code to read the response from a server endpoint after a post request. Actually I'm saving a data to a database and wait for a response before going to next step

casper.open('http://example.com/ajax.php, {
    method: 'POST',
    data: {
        'title': '<title>',
        'unique_id': '<unique_id>'
    }
});

on ajax.php file I'm trying to echo the POST request in a simple way. this will let me know easily if I'm getting the right response from the server.

echo json_encode($_POST);

I tried these snippets but I'm unable to get the response.

casper.on('page.resource.received', function(resp){
    this.echo(JSON.stringify(resp, null, 4));
});

casper.on('http.status.200', function(resp){
    this.echo(JSON.stringify(resp, null, 4));
});

casper.on('resource.received', function(resp) {
    this.echo(JSON.stringify(resp, null, 4));
});

Answer 1

As Roberto points out. You can use this.page.content to show the response. But you need to add the function(response) in your script. For example:

casper.open('http://example.com/ajax.php', {
    method: 'POST',
    data: {
        'title': '<title>',
        'unique_id': '<unique_id>'
    }
}, function(response){
    if(response.status == 200){
        require('utils').dump(this.page.content);
    }
});

Answer 2

If you want to unit test a REST API, CasperJS is not necessarily the right tool. CasperJS allows to observe a web browser which is running a web page. So a more typical approach would be to use CasperJS to load a page that would call your REST API and you would assert the page behavior is correct (assuming the page would make something observable according the AJAX call response).

Answer 3

I've been facing the same problem POSTing a query to ElasticSearch and I could not retrieve the results.

As far as I can understand if you want to retrieve the data echoed by your script the solution could be this:

this.echo(this.page.content);

or

this.echo(this.page.plainText);

in your function.

For example (my case with ElasticSearch):

/*
 * SOME VAR DEFINITIONS HERE    
 */

casper.start();

casper.then( function() {
    // the next var is very specific to ElasticSearch
    var elasticQuery = JSON.stringify (
      {
        'size' : 20,
        'query' : {
          'filtered' : {
            'filter' : { 'term' : { 'locked' : false } }
          }
        },
        'sort': { 'lastScrapeTime': { 'order': 'asc' } }
      }
    );

    var elasticRequest = {
      method: 'POST',
      data: elasticQuery
    }

    this.thenOpen( <<YOUR URL>>, elasticRequest, function (response) {
      // dump response header
      require('utils').dump(response);

      // echo response body
      this.echo(this.page.content);

      // echo response body with no tags added (useful for JSON)
      this.echo(this.page.plainText);
    }); 
  }
);

casper.run();