How to create a test user for automated testing?

[ac000]

HI,

Creating test users is fine, but you always have to go through the manual OAuth process. Then I noticed this line under the heading

What types of test user can I create? from the Create Test User API page.

"You can also create test users for use during automated testing"

Great! as I assume that means I can create a test user and hit some endpoints without needing any manual intervention. But how do I create such a user?

Sometimes I need to create test users in rapid fire succession to test stuff and having to go though the OAuth process each time really slows things down.

Either that or if there was way to reset a users state? I.e no periods created etc...

Cheers,
Andrew

[nameduser0]

Absolutely 100% agree.

I tried yesterday to automate the test user grantscope authorisation by mimicking a browser, but the final redirect back to the local software didn't work. It would be so much easier if there was an api for oauth scope authorisation in the sandbox.

100% automated testing is the only way

[hmrc-api-team]

Hi

Unfortunately there is no way to avoid the OAuth process. We currently automate this within our team by using Selenium WebDriver.

Once a user is created, the access token can be reused for 4 hours, and after this a new token can be retrieved using the OAuth API. So for most APIs, the users could be reused to avoid the whole setup journey.

There is no way to clear down the stateful behaviour in SA API at present, but we are looking to remove this in the near future which would enable you to send as many repeat requests as you wish.

[nameduser0]

For anyone else looking for an answer to this, the above answer is wrong. It's relatively straightforward to do the user authorisation part of the journey on the sandbox once you know you have to maintain the cookies too. Just use a requests.Session():

def authorise_hmrc_test_user(connapp, user):
	"""Mimics authorisation normally done by the user.
	The session maintains cookies so that the login session is maintained & redirect works
	Requests automatically performs location redirection"""
	import requests
	from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as bs

	auth_url = connapp.initiate_web_application_flow()

	urlresult = urlsplit(auth_url)
	base_url = urlunsplit([urlresult.scheme, urlresult.netloc, '', '', ''])

	s = requests.Session()
	# Expect a page with a continue button to a sign-in page
	r = s.get(auth_url)
	r.raise_for_status()
	log_redirects(r)
	soup = bs(r.text, 'html.parser')
	next_href = urljoin(base_url, soup.find('button', class_='govuk-button').parent['href'])

	# Expect a sign-in page with username and password form
	r = s.get(next_href)
	r.raise_for_status()
	log_redirects(r)
	soup = bs(r.text, 'html.parser')
	form = soup.find('form', action='/api-test-login/sign-in', method='POST')
	data = {}
	for field in form.find_all('input'):
		data[field['name']] = field.get('value')
		if field['name'] in ('userId', 'password'):
			data[field['name']] = user[field['name']]

	# Post the login form and expect another grant authority form
	r = s.post(urljoin(base_url, '/api-test-login/sign-in'), data=data)
	r.raise_for_status()
	log_redirects(r)
	soup = bs(r.text, 'html.parser')
	form = soup.find('form', action='/oauth/grantscope', method='POST')
	data = {}
	for field in form.find_all('input'):
		data[field['name']] = field.get('value')

	# Post the grant authority form
	r = s.post(urljoin(base_url, '/oauth/grantscope'), data=data, allow_redirects=False)
	r.raise_for_status()
	log_redirects(r)
	s.close()

	# Save the authorised token from the redirect url
	redirect = urlsplit(r.headers["Location"])
	if 'frappe.integrations.doctype.connected_app.connected_app.callback' in redirect.path:
		# Reuse the previous request as a dummy because connected_app uses frappe.request as input
		r.request.scheme = redirect.scheme
		r.request.root_path = redirect.netloc
		r.request.path = redirect.path
		r.request.method = 'GET'
		params = parse_qs(redirect.query)
		frappe.request = r.request
		frappe.integrations.doctype.connected_app.connected_app.callback(code=params['code'][0], state=params['state'][0])