How can I make a POST request from a Protractor test?

Question

I would like to make a POST request (with JSON payload) to a database server prior to running a Protractor test, in order to inject test data. How can I do this, if at all possible?

Answer 1

You can just use another library to run the POST request if you just want to populate your database.

For example, you can use superagent in your beforeEach like so:

var request = require( "superagent" );

describe( "Something", function() {

  beforeEach( function( done ) {
    request
      .post( "http://localhost/api/foo" )
      .send( {data : "something"} )
      .end( done );
  } );

} );

Answer 2

I found a way to do it, with the help of Andres D. The gist of it is to run a script in the browser via browser.executeAsyncScript and inject the $http service in there. The $http service is then told to make a POST request. Here's example CoffeeScript of how it's done:

browser.get('http://your-angular-app.com')
browser.executeAsyncScript((callback) ->
  $http = angular.injector(["ng"]).get("$http")
  $http(
    url: "http://yourservice.com"
    method: "post"
    data: yourData
    dataType: "json"
  )
  .success(->
    callback([true])
  ).error((data, status) ->
    callback([false, data, status])
  )
)
.then((data) ->
  [success, response] = data
  if success
    console.log("Browser async finished without errors")
  else
    console.log("Browser async finished with errors", response)
)