Handling Custom Exceptions from PHPUnit (Laravel 5.2) - laravel

Question

I'm currently playing around with Exception Handler, and creating my own custom exceptions.
I've been using PHPUnit to run tests on my Controller Resource, but when I throw my custom exceptions, Laravel thinks it's coming from a regular HTTP request rathen than AJAX.
Exceptions return different response based on wether it's an AJAX request or not, like the following:
<?php namespace Actuame\Exceptions\Castings;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;
use Exception;
use Actuame\Exceptions\ExceptionTrait;
class Already_Applied extends Exception
{
use ExceptionTrait;
var $redirect = '/castings';
var $message = 'castings.errors.already_applied';
}
And the ExceptionTrait goes as follows:
<?php
namespace Actuame\Exceptions;
trait ExceptionTrait
{
public function response(Request $request)
{
$type = $request->ajax() ? 'ajax' : 'redirect';
return $this->$type($request);
}
private function ajax(Request $request)
{
return response()->json(array('message' => $this->message), 404);
}
private function redirect(Request $request)
{
return redirect($this->redirect)->with('error', $this->message);
}
}
Finally, my test goes like this (excerpt of the test that's failing)
public function testApplyToCasting()
{
$faker = Factory::create();
$user = factory(User::class)->create();
$this->be($user);
$casting = factory(Casting::class)->create();
$this->json('post', '/castings/apply/' . $casting->id, array('message' => $faker->text(200)))
->seeJsonStructure(array('message'));
}
My logic is like this although I don't think the error is coming from here
public function apply(Request $request, User $user)
{
if($this->hasApplicant($user))
throw new Already_Applied;
$this->get()->applicants()->attach($user, array('message' => $request->message));
event(new User_Applied_To_Casting($this->get(), $user));
return $this;
}
When running PHPUnit, the error I get returned is
1) CastingsTest::testApplyToCasting PHPUnit_Framework_Exception:
Argument #2 (No Value) of PHPUnit_Framework_Assert:
:assertArrayHasKey() must be a array or ArrayAccess
/home/vagrant/Code/actuame2/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Foundation/T
esting/Concerns/MakesHttpRequests.php:304
/home/vagrant/Code/actuame2/tests/CastingsTest.php:105
And my laravel.log is over here http://pastebin.com/ZuaRaxkL (Too large to paste)
I have actually discovered that PHPUnit is not actually sending an AJAX response, because my ExceptionTrait actually changes the response on this. When running the test it takes the request as a regular POST request, and runs the redirect() response rather than ajax(), hence it's not returning the correspond.
Thanks a bunch!

Answer 1

I have finally found the solution!
As I said, response wasn't the right one as it was trying to redirect rathen than return a valid JSON response.
And after going through the Request code, I found out that I need to use also wantsJson(), as ajax() may not be the case always, so I have modified my trait to this:
<?php
namespace Actuame\Exceptions;
trait ExceptionTrait
{
public function response(Request $request)
{
// Below here, I added $request->wantsJson()
$type = $request->ajax() || $request->wantsJson() ? 'ajax' : 'redirect';
return $this->$type($request);
}
private function ajax(Request $request)
{
return response()->json(array('message' => $this->message), 404);
}
private function redirect(Request $request)
{
return redirect($this->redirect)->with('error', $this->message);
}
}