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Partner – Microsoft – NPI EA (cat = Baeldung)
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Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, visit the documentation page.

You can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

Partner – Microsoft – NPI EA (cat= Spring Boot)
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Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, you can get started over on the documentation page.

And, you can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (cat=Spring)
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Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

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Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (tag=Microservices)
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Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

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Since its introduction in Java 8, the Stream API has become a staple of Java development. The basic operations like iterating, filtering, mapping sequences of elements are deceptively simple to use.

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To get a better understanding on how Streams work and how to combine them with other language features, check out our guide to Java Streams:

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Explore Spring Boot 3 and Spring 6 in-depth through building a full REST API with the framework:

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I built the security material as two full courses - Core and OAuth, to get practical with these more complex scenarios. We explore when and how to use each feature and code through it on the backing project.

You can explore the course here:

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Spring Data JPA is a great way to handle the complexity of JPA with the powerful simplicity of Spring Boot.

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Partner – LambdaTest – NPI EA (cat=Testing)
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End-to-end testing is a very useful method to make sure that your application works as intended. This highlights issues in the overall functionality of the software, that the unit and integration test stages may miss.

Playwright is an easy-to-use, but powerful tool that automates end-to-end testing, and supports all modern browsers and platforms.

When coupled with LambdaTest (an AI-powered cloud-based test execution platform) it can be further scaled to run the Playwright scripts in parallel across 3000+ browser and device combinations:

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1. Overview

In this tutorial, we’ll discuss how to test REST services using REST-assured, with a focus on capturing and validating the response data from our REST APIs.

2. Setup for the Test Class

In previous tutorials, we’ve explored REST-assured in general, and we’ve shown how to manipulate request headers, cookies and parameters.

Building on this existing setup, we’ve added a simple REST controller, AppController, that internally calls a service, AppService. We’ll use these classes in our test examples.

To create our test class, we need to do a bit more setup. Since we have spring-boot-starter-test in our classpath, we can easily leverage Spring testing utilities.

First, let’s create the skeleton of our AppControllerIntegrationTest class:

@RunWith(SpringRunner.class)
@SpringBootTest(webEnvironment = WebEnvironment.RANDOM_PORT)
public class AppControllerIntegrationTest {

    @LocalServerPort
    private int port;

    private String uri;

    @PostConstruct
    public void init() {
        uri = "http://localhost:" + port;
    }

    @MockBean
    AppService appService;

     //test cases
}

In this JUnit test, we annotated our class with a couple of Spring-specific annotations that spin up the application locally in a random available port. In @PostConstruct, we captured the full URI on which we will be making REST calls.

We also used @MockBean on AppService, as we need to mock method calls on this class.

3. Validating the JSON Response

JSON is the most common format used in REST APIs to exchange data. Responses can consist of a single JSON object or an array of JSON objects. We’ll look at both in this section.

3.1. Single JSON Object

Let’s say we need to test the /movie/{id} endpoint, which returns a Movie JSON object if the id is found.

We’ll mock AppService calls to return some mock data using the Mockito framework:

@Test
public void givenMovieId_whenMakingGetRequestToMovieEndpoint_thenReturnMovie() {

    Movie testMovie = new Movie(1, "movie1", "summary1");
    when(appService.findMovie(1)).thenReturn(testMovie);

    get(uri + "/movie/" + testMovie.getId()).then()
      .assertThat()
      .statusCode(HttpStatus.OK.value())
      .body("id", equalTo(testMovie.getId()))
      .body("name", equalTo(testMovie.getName()))
      .body("synopsis", notNullValue());
}

Above, we first mocked the appService.findMovie(1) call to return an object. Then, we constructed our REST URL in the get() method provided by REST-assured for making GET requests. Finally, we made four assertions.

First, we checked the response status code and then the body elements. We’re using Hamcrest to assert the expected value.

Also note that if the response JSON is nested, we can test a nested key by using the dot operator like “key1.key2.key3”.

3.2. Extracting the JSON Response After Validation

In some cases, we may need to extract the response after validation, to perform additional operations on it.

We can extract the JSON response to a class, using the extract() method:

Movie result = get(uri + "/movie/" + testMovie.getId()).then()
  .assertThat()
  .statusCode(HttpStatus.OK.value())
  .extract()
  .as(Movie.class);
assertThat(result).isEqualTo(testMovie);

In this example, we directed REST-assured to extract the JSON response to a Movie object and then asserted on the extracted object.

We can also extract the whole response to a String, using the extract().asString() API:

String responseString = get(uri + "/movie/" + testMovie.getId()).then()
  .assertThat()
  .statusCode(HttpStatus.OK.value())
  .extract()
  .asString();
assertThat(responseString).isNotEmpty();

Finally, we can extract a particular field out of the response JSON as well.

Let’s look at a test for a POST API that expects a Movie JSON body and will return the same if inserted successfully:

@Test
public void givenMovie_whenMakingPostRequestToMovieEndpoint_thenCorrect() {
    Map<String, String> request = new HashMap<>();
    request.put("id", "11");
    request.put("name", "movie1");
    request.put("synopsis", "summary1");

    int movieId = given().contentType("application/json")
      .body(request)
      .when()
      .post(uri + "/movie")
      .then()
      .assertThat()
      .statusCode(HttpStatus.CREATED.value())
      .extract()
      .path("id");
    assertThat(movieId).isEqualTo(11);
}

Above, we first made the request object that we need to POST. We then extracted the id field from the returned JSON response using the path() method.

3.3. JSON Array

We can also verify the response if it’s a JSON array:

@Test
public void whenCallingMoviesEndpoint_thenReturnAllMovies() {

Set<Movie> movieSet = new HashSet<>();
movieSet.add(new Movie(1, "movie1", "summary1"));
movieSet.add(new Movie(2, "movie2", "summary2"));
when(appService.getAll()).thenReturn(movieSet);

get(uri + "/movies").then()
    .statusCode(HttpStatus.OK.value())
    .assertThat()
    .body("size()", is(2));
}

We again first mocked the appService.getAll() with some data and made a request to our endpoint. We then asserted the statusCode and size of our response array.

This again can be done via extraction:

Movie[] movies = get(uri + "/movies").then()
  .statusCode(200)
  .extract()
  .as(Movie[].class);
assertThat(movies.length).isEqualTo(2);

We can verify a header or cookie of the response using methods with the same name:

@Test
public void whenCallingWelcomeEndpoint_thenCorrect() {
    get(uri + "/welcome").then()
        .assertThat()
        .header("sessionId", notNullValue())
        .cookie("token", notNullValue());
}

We can also extract the headers and cookies individually:

Response response = get(uri + "/welcome");

String headerName = response.getHeader("sessionId");
String cookieValue = response.getCookie("token");
assertThat(headerName).isNotBlank();
assertThat(cookieValue).isNotBlank();

5. Validating Files

If our REST API returns a file, we can use the asByteArray() method to extract the response:

File file = new ClassPathResource("test.txt").getFile();
long fileSize = file.length();
when(appService.getFile(1)).thenReturn(file);

byte[] result = get(uri + "/download/1").asByteArray();

assertThat(result.length).isEqualTo(fileSize);

Here, we first mocked appService.getFile(1) to return a text file that is present in our src/test/resources path. We then made a call to our endpoint and extracted the response in a byte[], which we then asserted to have the expected value.

6. Conclusion

In this tutorial, we looked into different ways of capturing and validating responses from our REST APIs using REST-assured.

The code backing this article is available on GitHub. Once you're logged in as a Baeldung Pro Member, start learning and coding on the project.
Baeldung Pro – NPI EA (cat = Baeldung)
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Baeldung Pro comes with both absolutely No-Ads as well as finally with Dark Mode, for a clean learning experience:

>> Explore a clean Baeldung

Once the early-adopter seats are all used, the price will go up and stay at $33/year.

Partner – Microsoft – NPI EA (cat = Spring Boot)
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Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, visit the documentation page.

You can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (cat = Spring)
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Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (tag = Microservices)
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Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

eBook – HTTP Client – NPI EA (cat=HTTP Client-Side)
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The Apache HTTP Client is a very robust library, suitable for both simple and advanced use cases when testing HTTP endpoints. Check out our guide covering basic request and response handling, as well as security, cookies, timeouts, and more:

>> Download the eBook

eBook – Java Concurrency – NPI EA (cat=Java Concurrency)
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Handling concurrency in an application can be a tricky process with many potential pitfalls. A solid grasp of the fundamentals will go a long way to help minimize these issues.

Get started with understanding multi-threaded applications with our Java Concurrency guide:

>> Download the eBook

eBook – Java Streams – NPI EA (cat=Java Streams)
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Since its introduction in Java 8, the Stream API has become a staple of Java development. The basic operations like iterating, filtering, mapping sequences of elements are deceptively simple to use.

But these can also be overused and fall into some common pitfalls.

To get a better understanding on how Streams work and how to combine them with other language features, check out our guide to Java Streams:

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eBook – Persistence – NPI EA (cat=Persistence)
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Working on getting your persistence layer right with Spring?

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Partner – Microsoft – NPI (cat=Spring)
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Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, visit the documentation page.

You can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

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