Testing Partial JSON Responses with Laravel

Laravel provides many useful helpers for testing your application and it has great support for testing HTTP testing through its fluent API.

A feature added to v5.4.10 is a new assertJsonFragment method that allows you to look for a specific fragment instead of the whole JSON response.

Laravel JSON response

Here is a quick example of a Laravel JSON response to show how this can work. Let’s say your app has a way to fetch information on a specific user:

1Route::get('/api/users', function() {
2    return App\User::all();
3});

This returns the JSON for all the users:

1// /api/user/
2[
3    {"id":1,"name":"Bill Murray","email":"bill.murray@example.org","created_at":"2017-02-14 01:53:04","updated_at":"2017-02-14 01:53:04"},
4    {"id":2,"name":"John Doe","email":"john.doe@example.org","created_at":"2017-02-14 02:23:14","updated_at":"2017-02-14 02:23:14"}
5]

Utilizing Laravel’s assertJsonFragment

Now with the new assertJsonFragment you can test it like this:

 1/** @test */
 2function test_json_response()
 3{
 4    $response = $this->json('GET', '/api/user/1');
 5
 6    $response
 7        ->assertStatus(200)
 8        ->assertJsonFragment([
 9            'name' => 'Bill Murray',
10        ]);
11}

This is just another small tool available in your arsenal to make testing easier. Check out the documentation for other methods of testing JSON responses.