Guide to Common Unit-Testing Use-Cases

Common Use-Cases And How To Handle Them

• Testing State With Dynamo
• Testing The Address API

Testing With Dynamo

Dynamo can be tricky to test with locally, because there is lots of setup to be done to work with Dynamo locally on your laptop.

To bypass this, simple enable our mock dynamo in your testing configuration:

configuration:
  dynamo: mock
  userId: MyUserID

With this enabled, a local in-memory version of Dynamo will be used instead.

You can also specifiy values for userId and deviceId in the configuration. In this way, different user scenarios can be worked on.

The mock Dynamo DB will maintain it's state for the execution of the entire test suite (a single file). It will be reset between test file executions, so it will be wiped clean when a new test file begins running.

In that way, the state can be modified from test to test and checked.

More information on how it works here (opens new window).

Testing With The Address API

The Address API can also be mocked, and specified to reply with a specific value.

To set the address to be returned from the Address API via mock, just enter a configuration like so:

configuration:
  address:
    addressLine1: 215 Elm Street, NW
    city: Washington
    countryCode: US
    postalCode: 20816
    stateOrRegion: DC

That will return a full address when the Alexa Address API is called.

To emulate just the countryAndPostalCode permission, enter an address with just those values:

configuration:
  address:
    countryCode: US
    postalCode: 20816

This will return the country and postal code when requested - NOTE it will return a 403 if the full address is requested. The other address fields must be provided to emulate the user providing the full permission.

If no address information is provided, the Address API will return a 403 - which indicates no permission was received from the user.

Testing With The User Profile Service API

The User Profile Service API can also be mocked and specified to reply with a specific value.

To set the user data to be returned from the User Profile Service API via mock, just enter a configuration like so:

configuration:
  userProfile:
    name: James Tiberius Kirk
    givenName: James
    email: kirk@enterprise.org
    mobileNumber:
      countryCode: +1
      phoneNumber: 123456789

That will return each of the user data when the corresponding service is called.

If any of the user attributes are not provided, the mock will return a 403 for that specific attribute - which indicates no permission was received from the user.