Testing Node.js app with Zombie

Question

I am writing a node.js app in coffee-script using the express framework. After exploring a couple of options I finally decided to use mocha and zombie.js. However, I am having a hard testing the UI. For example, to implement a successful user authentication I do the following: see the code pasted here my_gist

What I really wanted to do is the following:

• call get '/sessions/new', which will call the SessionsController and display the authentication form
• then I'll call the browser.visit method, enter the values for the fields and submit the form, which will generate a post method

• if the username and password are correct, I'll expect the SessionsController to react accordingly and redirect to the right page. Unfortunately, whenever I run the tests it complains about Zombie: require is not defined ReferenceError: require is not defined. It turns out it doesn't like the two lines in my /javascripts/app.js

  
  require("coffee-script")
  require('./tfs.coffee')
  

Even when I try to extract any information from the browser after the visit method, I just get undefined values. Apparently none of my assertions is being tested. It just passes the test. Is there anything I am doing wrong? Has anyone testing coffee-script written app in express using Zombie.js faced that problem? what could be the fix?

Answer 1

If /javascripts/app.js is being loaded from the browser, you would want to make sure that RequireJS (or some other browser framework that defines require) is loaded first, or load them in your HTML document:

<script src="coffee-script.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="tfs.coffee" type="text/coffee"></script>

You might need to wait until the page is fully loaded before extracting values.