We’ve created a number of FlexUnit 4 (FU4) tests for our current, large project and the suite of tests that seems to be of the most importance to both us and our client is the one that tests the services. Our client’s back-end services are simple JSPs that return XML payloads for a number of CRUD operations on various objects in the system, so we’d like to test sending good required data as well as bad required data to our delegate before hitting the service directly.

The issue we ran into was quite frustrating and it took me some time to figure it out — I actually had to explain the system of tests to my partner before it dawned on me what was going wrong. In order to actually hit the services and get data back, you need to be logged into our client’s system…except this isn’t done through a Flex login, but rather via the larger application’s HTML login in which our smaller app lives (SSO)…once you’re logged in, a cookie is sent back and forth between the client and server…such is the security design of our client’s application framework and there wasn’t any wiggle room to change this.

Change SWF to Open With Browser

Now think about FU4 and how it actually runs the tests (when using Ant and not building and running with FlexBuilder)…it simply opens up a TestRunner.swf in the Flash Player to execute it’s tests…this means no browser wrapper for our SWF and thus no access to cookies…and ultimately no working services in my tests…grrrr.

So here’s a simple solution (on Mac)…open up Finder and locate your TestRunner.swf, right-click on it and select “Get Info”. Find the section “Open with” and change the application to your browser (I use FireFox), but don’t click the button change for all, as we just want to change this for this file and this file only. Voila! Now your TestRunner.swf will run in thr browser when your Ant buld runs and you will have access t cookies (assuming you’ve already logged into the system you need access to in the same browser session).

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