REST Assured Tutorial 14 –RequestSpecification – How the request will look like

Introduction

As a part of End to End REST Assured Tutorial, in this post, we will learn about RequestSpecification in Rest Assured. We will learn what, when, and how to use RequestSpecification in Rest Assured.

Prerequisite

I have used below dependency of Rest Assured library for this post:-

    io.rest-assured
    rest-assured
    4.3.1
    test

Why RequestSpecification?

Observe the below lines of codes carefully. You will find that we have some common statements in both @Test methods after given() method call.

package RequestSpecificationExamples;

import org.testng.annotations.Test;

import io.restassured.RestAssured;

public class WithoutUsingRequestSpecification {
	
	@Test
	public void getAllBookings()
	{
		// Given
		RestAssured
		  .given()
		  // Common baseURI and basePath
			 .baseUri("https://restful-booker.herokuapp.com")
			 .basePath("/booking")
		// When
		   .when()
		// Then
		   .then()
		   .statusLine("HTTP/1.1 200 OK");	
		
	}
	
	@Test
	public void getBookingDetailsWithInvalidFirstName()
	{
		// Given
		RestAssured
		  .given()
		  // Common baseURI and basePath
			 .baseUri("https://restful-booker.herokuapp.com")
			 .basePath("/booking")
			 .param("firstName", "Rahul")
		// When
		   .when()
		// Then
		   .then()
		   .statusLine("HTTP/1.1 200 OK");		
	}

}

Above we have only two tests but in real-time you may have many. A group of tests will have some common specifications to create a request. Following the DRY principle is the best way to write clean code. We have repeated common request specifications in both tests which is not a good practice. If we need to modify then we need to make changes every placed used.

To club common request specifications together and put as a common entity, we can use RequestSpecification in Rest Assured. RequestSpecification is an interface that allows you to specify how the request will look like. This interface has readymade methods to define base URL, base path, headers, etc. We need to use given() method of RestAssured class to get a reference for RequestSpecification. Remember RequestSpecification is an interface and we can not create an object of it. RequestSpecificationImpl is its implemented class.

How to use RequestSpecification?

A RequestSpecification with some specifications can be created as below:-

RequestSpecification requestSpecification = RestAssured.given();
requestSpecification.baseUri("https://restful-booker.herokuapp.com")
requestSpecification.basePath("/booking");

Or instead of calling RequestSpecification reference multiple times, we can use the builder pattern as below:-

RequestSpecification requestSpecification = 
        RestAssured.given()
		.baseUri("https://restful-booker.herokuapp.com")
		.basePath("/booking");

We can add a RequestSpecification to a request in multiple ways as shown below:-

RestAssured.given(requestSpecification)
OR
RestAssured.given().spec(requestSpecification)

Example Program

package RequestSpecificationExamples;

import org.testng.annotations.BeforeClass;
import org.testng.annotations.Test;

import io.restassured.RestAssured;
import io.restassured.specification.RequestSpecification;

public class WithRequestSpecification {
	
	RequestSpecification requestSpecification;
	
	@BeforeClass
	public void setupRequestSpecification()
	{
		requestSpecification = RestAssured.given()
		.baseUri("https://restful-booker.herokuapp.com")
		.basePath("/booking");
	}
	
	@Test
	public void getAllBookings()
	{
		// Given
		RestAssured
		  .given()
		  .spec(requestSpecification)
		// When
		   .when()
		// Then
		   .then()
		   .statusLine("HTTP/1.1 200 OK");	
		
	}
	
	@Test
	public void getBookingDetailsWithInvalidFirstName()
	{
		// Given
		RestAssured
		  .given(requestSpecification)
			 .param("firstName", "Rahul")
		// When
		   .when()
		// Then
		   .then()
		   .statusLine("HTTP/1.1 200 OK");		
	}
}

There are two methods in RestAssured class to start creating Request specifications:-

1. given()
2. with()

The return type of both methods is RequestSpecification. There is no difference between the above two methods. The only difference is syntactical. An example code is below:-

package RequestSpecificationExamples;

import io.restassured.RestAssured;
import io.restassured.response.Response;
import io.restassured.specification.RequestSpecification;

public class RequestSpecificationExample {

	public static void main(String[] args) {

		// Creating request specification using given()
		RequestSpecification request1 = RestAssured.given();
		// Setting Base URI
		request1.baseUri("https://restful-booker.herokuapp.com");
		// Setting Base Path
		request1.basePath("/booking");

		// Creating request specification using with()
		RequestSpecification request2 = RestAssured.with();
		// Setting Base URI
		request2.baseUri("https://restful-booker.herokuapp.com");
		// Setting Base Path
		request2.basePath("/ping");

		// You can also use builder pattern as below
		RequestSpecification request3 = RestAssured.with();
		request3.baseUri("https://restful-booker.herokuapp.com").basePath("/ping");

	}

}

You can download/clone the above sample project from here.

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