REST Assured Tutorial 20 – How to Send a JSON/XML File as Payload to Request

As a part of End to End REST Assured Tutorial , in this post We will learn about “How to send a JSON/XML file as payload to request in Rest Assured”.

Suppose you have a request payload (JSON or XML) in a file and you required to directly send that file as a payload to request in stead of reading it first and then passing. Sending file as a payload directly is a good idea when you have static payloads or minimal modification.

“body()” method of RequestSpecification interface is a overloaded method to allow you to pass payload in different ways. We will use body() method which accepts “File” as argument. Javadoc is below:-

Table of Contents

Sending a .json file as a payload

Step 1:- Create a .json file and write payload in that. Keep the file in “src/test/resources” folder.

Step 2 :- Create a File in Java using “File” and pass to body() method.

package DifferentWaysOfPassingPayloadToRequest;

import java.io.File;

import org.hamcrest.Matchers;
import org.testng.annotations.Test;

import io.restassured.RestAssured;
import io.restassured.http.ContentType;

public class PassFileAsPayload {
	
	@Test
	public void passFileAsPayload()
	{
		// Creating a File instance 
		File jsonDataInFile = new File("src/test/resources/Payloads/AuthPayload.json");
		
		//GIVEN
		RestAssured
		    .given()
				.baseUri("https://restful-booker.herokuapp.com/auth")
				.contentType(ContentType.JSON)
				.body(jsonDataInFile)
		// WHEN
			.when()
				.post()
				// THEN
			.then()
				.assertThat()
				.statusCode(200)
				.body("token", Matchers.notNullValue())
				.body("token.length()", Matchers.is(15))
				.body("token", Matchers.matchesRegex("^[a-z0-9]+$"));
	}

}

package DifferentWaysOfPassingPayloadToRequest;

import java.io.File;

import org.hamcrest.Matchers;

import org.testng.annotations.Test;

import io.restassured.RestAssured;

import io.restassured.http.ContentType;

public class PassFileAsPayload {

@Test

public void passFileAsPayload()

{

// Creating a File instance

File jsonDataInFile = new File("src/test/resources/Payloads/AuthPayload.json");

//GIVEN

RestAssured

.given()

.baseUri("https://restful-booker.herokuapp.com/auth")

.contentType(ContentType.JSON)

.body(jsonDataInFile)

// WHEN

.when()

.post()

// THEN

.then()

.assertThat()

.statusCode(200)

.body("token", Matchers.notNullValue())

.body("token.length()", Matchers.is(15))

.body("token", Matchers.matchesRegex("^[a-z0-9]+$"));

}

Sending a .xml file as a payload

Step 1:- Create a .xml file and write payload in that. Keep the file in “src/test/resources” folder.

Step 2:- Create a File in Java using “File” and pass to body() method.

@Test
	public void passXMLFileAsPayload()
	{
		// Creating a File instance 
		File jsonDataInFile = new File("src/test/resources/Payloads/AuthPayload.xml");
		
		//GIVEN
		RestAssured
		    .given()
				.baseUri("https://restful-booker.herokuapp.com/auth")
				// Since I am passing payload as xml. Anyway it is optional as Rest Assured automatically identifies.
				.contentType(ContentType.XML)
				.body(jsonDataInFile)
		// WHEN
			.when()
				.post()
				// THEN
			.then()
				.assertThat()
				.statusCode(200);
	}

@Test

public void passXMLFileAsPayload()

{

// Creating a File instance

File jsonDataInFile = new File("src/test/resources/Payloads/AuthPayload.xml");

//GIVEN

RestAssured

.given()

.baseUri("https://restful-booker.herokuapp.com/auth")

// Since I am passing payload as xml. Anyway it is optional as Rest Assured automatically identifies.

.contentType(ContentType.XML)

.body(jsonDataInFile)

// WHEN

.when()

.post()

// THEN

.then()

.assertThat()

.statusCode(200);

}

You can clone/download example repo here.

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Author: Amod Mahajan

My name is Amod Mahajan and I am an IT employee with 6+ years of experience in Software testing and staying in Bengaluru. My area of interest is Automation testing. I started from basics and went through so many selenium tutorials. Thanks to Mukesh Otwani as his tutorials are easy and cover basics to advance. I have habit of exploring concepts by deep diving. I used to make notes. I thought of sharing my knowledge through posts and now I am here. #KeepLearning #ShareLearning

4 thoughts on “REST Assured Tutorial 20 – How to Send a JSON/XML File as Payload to Request”

lauritchka says:

August 19, 2021 at 4:16 am

Hi! I’m new on automation and rest assured… I’m facing the very same situation that you stated here: pass a json file in the body of rest assured. So I did exactly how you mention and I’m getting error 400 because it’s not sending the content, but the path of the file as a string.
Also, I downloaded your project on GIT and when I try to run the test of this example, and it opens another random class and the test is not executed..
I really don’t understand why it isn’t working.. 🙁

neetu says:

May 21, 2021 at 12:03 pm

Thank you very much to post this. it resolved my xml issue.

Gaurav Khurana says:

December 14, 2020 at 8:15 pm

Thank you, able to run it, just to share with everyone, when we pass as XML, the output we get as

{
“reason”: “Bad credentials”
}

SHEELA says:

June 26, 2020 at 1:40 am

can you please let me know how can I pass xml attribute value like for username attribute,you have admin value which I want to pass via testdata as variable (meaning xml format is same but value getting change based on requimrnt )…my testdata file is reading data in json form.