Hello! I am somewhat new to wiremock and could use a little help with the response templating helpers. Specifically the

#each

helper described here. I have a request body with an

persons

array property containing a varied amount of items. The mock should edit these persons in the response by adding a random generated UUID to each. For the example request:

{
  persons: [
    {"name": "Andy", "age": 34}, 
    {"name": "Rick", "age": 18}, 
    {"name": "Michael", "age": 48}
  ]
}

The response should be:

{
  persons: [
    {"id": "a6aa0b30-8afd-43d6-af25-431b7c3d08ba", "name": "Andy", "age": 34}, 
    {"id": "d2255b1a-d4fa-4b27-a459-69bde072ba36", "name": "Rick", "age": 18}, 
    {"id": "dc644b5a-9a0e-4e3d-b82a-c53e2b7f1561", "name": "Michael", "age": 48}
  ]
}

With the id being randomly generated. What I have managed to do so far is fix the number of persons in the array with the following template:

{
  ...
  "response": {
    "jsonBody": {
      "persons": [
        {
          "id": "{{randomValue type='UUID'}}",
          "name": "{{jsonPath request.body '$.persons[0].name'}}"
          "age": "{{jsonPath request.body '$.persons[0].age'}}"
        },
        {
          "id": "{{randomValue type='UUID'}}",
          "name": "{{jsonPath request.body '$.persons[1].name'}}"
          "age": "{{jsonPath request.body '$.persons[1].age'}}"
        },
        {
          "id": "{{randomValue type='UUID'}}",
          "name": "{{jsonPath request.body '$.persons[2].name'}}"
          "age": "{{jsonPath request.body '$.persons[2].age'}}"
        }
      ]
    },
    "transformers": ["response-template"]
  }

}

```
This only works for exactly 3 people, though. How do I make use of the
```{{#each request.body.persons as |person|}}
  <voodoo magic here>
{{/each}}

Helper in my json response template file? Any help would be appreciated.

Try this:

{
  persons: [
      {{#each (jsonPath request.body '$.persons') as |person|}}
      {"id": "{{randomValue type='UUID'}}", "name": "{{ person.name }}", "age": {{ person.age }} }
      {{/each}}
  ]
}

This results in malformed json.

Oh yes, needs the commas and no trailing comma...

Yes but SpringBoot can't parse the json if it contains those handlebars.

I ran the output from my second example through a json linter, it's valid json

Then I guess my question is how do I tell IntelliJ that it's valid json and make SpringBoot interpret it as such?

I don't really understand where Spring Boot comes into it. IntelliJ - just suppress the warning, IntelliJ's wrong to assume that

withBody

should be valid JSON, it can be any String

So IntelliJ doesn't let me suppress this warning but that's alright, it can execute my tests regardless. However the substitution of those handlebars does not seem to get applied and I get this error when I run my spring boot tests:

org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationException: Error creating bean with name 'org.springframework.cloud.contract.wiremock.WireMockConfiguration': Invocation of init method failed; nested exception is com.github.tomakehurst.wiremock.common.JsonException: {
  "errors" : [ {
    "code" : 10,
    "source" : {
      "pointer" : "/response/jsonBody"
    },
    "title" : "Error parsing JSON",
    "detail" : "Unexpected character ('{' (code 123)): was expecting double-quote to start field name\n at [Source: (String)\"{\r\n  \"scenarioName\": \"CREATE_PERSONS\",\r\n ....
}

Are you enabling response templating for that stub?

Am I missing somethign here? I assumed it was due to SpringBoot but perhaps I was wrong.

I'm not immediately familiar with what's going on with SpringBoot creating a WireMockConfiguration - I'll have a look

Hm let me see what I can share here

Yes, thanks - so how are you specifying the stub mapping? Can you paste your code?

I have removed some irrelevant properties from the response but the gist is this:

{
  "scenarioName": "CREATE_PERSONS",
  "requiredScenarioState": "CREATE",
  "request": {
    "method": "POST",
    "url": "/groups"
  },
  "response": {
    "status": 201,
    "jsonBody": {
      "persons": [
        {{#each (jsonPath request.body '$.persons') as |person|}}
        {
          "id": "{{randomValue type='UUID'}}", 
          "name": "{{ person.name }}", 
          "age": {{ person.age }} a
        }{{#unless @last}},{{/unless}}
        {{/each}}
      ],
      "auditDetails": {
        "version": 0
      }
    },
    "headers": {
      "Content-Type": "application/json"
    },
    "transformers": ["response-template"]
  }
}

OK, you can't use

jsonBody

there because it's a template, not json. Try just

body

which contents need to be escaped? Do you mean I have to wrap them all in a String ("<escaped content>")?

You might prefer to use

bodyFileName

and point to a separate file so that you don't have to put the whole thing on one line and don't have to escape anything.

I'll try it out

No, it shouldn't matter what the file ending is

yeah I thought so. jsonlint.com does not see

{
  "persons": [
      {{#each (jsonPath request.body '$.persons') as |person|}}
      {"id": "{{randomValue type='UUID'}}", "name": "{{ person.name }}", "age": {{ person.age }} }{{#unless @last}},{{/unless}}
      {{/each}}
  ]
}

as valid json.

A response template won't be valid json, it's handlebars

ah ok so those are not the same. aparently it's trying to parse it as json

That looks like you have

groupName

in the stub mapping json...

yes but it's a simple property that's part of the stub response template

Perhaps the classpath resource hasn't updated? You would get that error if you had json that looked like this:

{
  "scenarioName": "CREATE_PERSONS",
  "requiredScenarioState": "CREATE",
  "request": {
    "method": "POST",
    "url": "/groups"
  },
  "response": {
    "status": 201,
    "bodyFileName": "Groups.json.handlebars",
    "headers": {
      "Content-Type": "application/json"
    },
    "transformers": [
      "response-template"
    ]
  },
  "groupName": "s"
}

Hm no that's not the case

Oh, I see - the problem is that your

createGroupResponseTemplate.json

is in the directory that it's loading stubs from so it's treating it as a stub json and it isn't

oooh that makes a lot of sense.

I guess that

@AutoConfigureWireMock(port = 0, stubs = "classpath:/wiremock_stubs/Groups")

just takes all json files in

/wiremock_stubs/Groups

and tries to turn them into stubs. I don't know if Spring will recurse into subdirs? If not you could put your body into

/wiremock_stubs/Groups/bodies/createGroupResponseTemplate.json

and it might work with

"bodyFileName": "bodies/createGroupResponseTemplate.json"

Or perhaps just naming it

createGroupResponseTemplate.json.handlebars

would be enough to stop Spring treating it as a stub?

I have it in a subdir already, it does recurse and take all files it can find in the folder.

Is this useful? https://cloud.spring.io/spring-cloud-contract/2.1.x/multi/multi__spring_cloud_contract_wiremock.html#_using_files_to_specify_the_stub_bodies

Well

Did you follow this bit of the Spring docs? "To customize this location you can set the files attribute in the @AutoConfigureWireMock annotation to the location of the parent directory"

Oh so that's a specific directory name then? I'll see what the Config lets me do

Thanks, glad it's nearly there. Have a good weekend.

Hi Rob, you seemed interested in this issue so I thought I'd give you an update. It turns out the whole template thing does not work for me because when parsing the template, new lines are not escaped and it looks like Spring cannot handle literal \n characters in the response body string. At this point I gave up and have to just live with tests using 3 fixed persons in the response array.

I'm a bit confused again - the body file is being loaded but something doesn't like the

\r

carriage return character. What is it that doesn't like it? The waters are quite muddy because of having Spring in the mix, so stack traces with errors are going to be vital to understanding what's going ion.

Correct, the body file is being loaded and the whole file is parsed as a String. However Spring seems to be unable to handle raw /n characters in that string and would need them to be escaped or more likely even completely removed before it can parse the json into a response object. Here is the relevant part of the stack trace: https://pastebin.com/wgEgH1Rr Also this is the wiremock output for the matched response definition it found:

Matched response definition:
{
  "status" : 201,
  "body" : "{\n  \"groupName\": \"Mock Group Name\",\n  \"department\": \"Mock Department\",\n  \"persons\": [\n      {\n        \"id\": \"d822a6b5-8b5e-4f97-9690-dc87b3e6654e\", \n        \"name\": \"Mock Name P1\", \n        \"age\": \"23\"\n      },\n      {\n        \"id\": \"e9ddf0f5-1d49-4bd9-8a89-975a82b0a966\", \n        \"name\": \"Mock Name P2\", \n        \"age\": \"32\"\n      }\n  ]\n}\n",
  "bodyFileName" : "createGroup.wiremock",
  "headers" : {
    "Content-Type" : "application/json"
  },
  "transformers" : [ "response-template" ]
}

Why have you got

body

and

bodyFileName

? You should have one or the other (in this case

bodyFileName

).

Well my mappings file only has bodyFileName. In the log output it adds the body as the parsed string of the template file.

Oh, OK, sorry, quite likely I should have known that

No worries

It's a little hard to tell - am I right that the exception is happening when your code is parsing the response from WireMock?

yes that looks correct

I've put together my own test of this and it doesn't reproduce it (Wiremock 2.35.0) From the error it appears that WireMock is responding with a body that is not valid json, because the

items

key should be a string but contains an unescaped new line. As there is no

items

key in the Matched response definition you've sent I guess that it's not actually the real values. But it's probably that your

createGroup.wiremock

handlebars file does not resolve to valid json. You could try copying the value of the

body

key in the Matched response definition out, sticking it through a json unescaper, and saving the result into a json file - IntelliJ will probably then show you what's wrong with it.

You are a wizard, Rob 😄

Good, glad we got there!