Why does Karate strip chars from the front of my field names? - graphql

Question

There is something strange going on with one of my Karate tests. I have quite a few I've inherited (rather than written myself) and they mostly all work fine. My application uses GraphQL and I'm changing an existing mutation function to add an argument. The new argument is a list of DestinationInput defined like this:
createScheduledTitles(titles: [ScheduledTitleInput!]!, destinations: [DestinationInput]!): [ScheduledTitle!]!
This is how I set up my arguments in my Karate script:
* def input =
"""
{titles: [ {
...
],
destinations: [
{
'destinationType': "od",
'brightcovePublish': "true"
}
]
}
"""
This gets rejected by the server end (java) with:
The variables input contains a field name 'stinationType' that is not defined for input object type 'DestinationInput'
Well, yes, of course but I'm supplying 'destinationType' not 'stinationType'. When I check the log of what was sent though I see this:
"destinations": [
{
"stinationType": "od",
"ightcovePublish": "true"
}
]
Huh? Where'd those initial characters go? I've since tried every combination of quotes (double, single, none) on field names and arguments. I've tried different line formatting etc. Some slight differences, some combinations leave the quotes in the field name so I see stinationtype\' as the field name in error, and sometimes it chews more letters off the front. I've retyped the field names in case I'd edited some hidden chars in there. So far nothing gets me to success. I've other working examples of this kind of thing and I've copied their format, but still no joy. Whatever is happening is at the client end because the log is showing the bad field names as being sent. Anyone know what I'm doing wrong?

Answer 1

Dev of Karate here - this is weird, never seen anything like it. Do keep in mind this may be a genuine server-side bug - but I guess you have looked at the request / http log.
My other guess without seeing the whole project structure is there may be some custom Java / JS code that is pre-processing the request, common for GraphQL projects. Try forming a cURL request that works, step 2 is convert that to a simple (hard-coded) karate test. and if you can manage this process, we can look at it: https://github.com/intuit/karate/wiki/How-to-Submit-an-Issue
But I just tried using your sample JSON in a test you can replicate (even the HTTP POST). So try pasting this into a fresh Scenario:
Scenario:
* def input =
"""
{titles: [
{}
],
destinations: [
{
'destinationType': "od",
'brightcovePublish': "true"
}
]
}
"""
* print input
* url 'https://httpbin.org/post'
* request input
* method post
Which results in:
14:26:59.370 [main] INFO com.intuit.karate - [print] {
"titles": [
{
}
],
"destinations": [
{
"destinationType": "od",
"brightcovePublish": "true"
}
]
}
14:26:59.614 [main] DEBUG com.intuit.karate - request:
1 > POST https://httpbin.org/post
1 > Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
1 > Connection: Keep-Alive
1 > Content-Length: 84
1 > Content-Type: application/json; charset=UTF-8
1 > Host: httpbin.org
1 > User-Agent: Apache-HttpClient/4.5.11 (Java/1.8.0_231)
{"titles":[{}],"destinations":[{"destinationType":"od","brightcovePublish":"true"}]}
14:27:00.890 [main] DEBUG com.intuit.karate - response time in milliseconds: 1274.99
1 < 200
1 < Access-Control-Allow-Credentials: true
1 < Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
1 < Connection: keep-alive
1 < Content-Length: 696
1 < Content-Type: application/json
1 < Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2020 08:57:00 GMT
1 < Server: gunicorn/19.9.0
{
"args": {},
"data": "{\"titles\":[{}],\"destinations\":[{\"destinationType\":\"od\",\"brightcovePublish\":\"true\"}]}",
"files": {},
"form": {},
"headers": {
"Accept-Encoding": "gzip,deflate",
"Content-Length": "84",
"Content-Type": "application/json; charset=UTF-8",
"Host": "httpbin.org",
"User-Agent": "Apache-HttpClient/4.5.11 (Java/1.8.0_231)",
"X-Amzn-Trace-Id": "Root=1-5e450f5c-18d2618834da3a7afdd3402a"
},
"json": {
"destinations": [
{
"brightcovePublish": "true",
"destinationType": "od"
}
],
"titles": [
{}
]
},
"origin": "103.15.250.10",
"url": "https://httpbin.org/post"
}