Testing Asynchronous Code

It's common in Lua for code to run asynchronously. When you have code that runs asynchronously, Jest Lua needs to know when the code it is testing has completed, before it can move on to another test. Jest Lua has several ways to handle this.

Promises

Return a promise from your test, and Jest Lua will wait for that promise to resolve. If the promise is rejected, the test will fail.

For example, let's say that fetchData returns a promise that is supposed to resolve to the string 'peanut butter'. We could test it with:

note

Tests can ONLY return either a Promise or nil.

test('the data is peanut butter', function()
	return Promise.resolve()
		:andThen(function()
			local data = fetchData()
			expect(data).toBe('peanut butter')
		end)
end)

Callbacks

If you don't use promises, you can use callbacks. For example, let's say that fetchData, instead of returning a promise, expects a callback, i.e. fetches some data and calls callback(error, data) when it is complete. You want to test that this returned data is the string 'peanut butter'.

By default, Jest Lua tests complete once they reach the end of their execution. That means this test will not work as intended:

-- Don't do this!
test('the data is peanut butter', function()
	local function callback(error_, data)
		if error_ then
			error(error_)
		end
		expect(data).toBe('peanut butter')
	end

	fetchData(callback)
end)

The problem is that the test will complete as soon as fetchData completes, before ever calling the callback.

There is an alternate form of test that fixes this. Instead of putting the test in a function with an empty argument, use a single argument called done, which is passed as a second parameter to the test function. Jest Lua will wait until the done callback is called before finishing the test.

test('the data is peanut butter', function(_, done)
	local function callback(error_, data)
		if error_ then
			done(error_)
			return
		end
		xpcall(function()
			expect(data).toBe('peanut butter')
			done()
		end, function(err)
			done(err)
		end)
	end

	fetchData(callback)
end)

If done() is never called, the test will fail (with timeout error), which is what you want to happen.

If the expect statement fails, it throws an error and done() is not called. If we want to see in the test log why it failed, we have to wrap expect in a xpcall block and pass the error in the error handler to done. Otherwise, we end up with an opaque timeout error that doesn't show what value was received by expect(data).

danger

done() should not be mixed with Promises in your tests.