How to return value in async testing via done?

[chenweiyj]

I am testing my apis by using mocha. Since calling to my apis needs authorization, I call the authorization api to get the access token in the beforeEach hook. I wrap the doFakeAuth function in the utils.js file and export it, which is denoted as follows.

exports.doFakeAuth = function (done) {
  var route = '/v1/auth/weibo';
  var body = {
    weibo_uid: 'test_weibo_uid_full_data',
    avatarurl: 'http://fake_weibo',
    birth_year: 1995,
    birth_month: 5,
    birth_day: 8,
    gender: 2,
    nickname: 'cw',
    signature: 'i will win'
  }

  request(url)
    .post(route)
    .send(body)
    .expect('Content-Type', /json/)
    .expect(200)
    .end(function (err, res) {
      if (err) throw err;
      //
      res.body.should.have.property('user');
      res.body.should.have.property('token');
      res.body.user.should.have.length(24);
      return res.body.token;
      done();
    });
}

However, I cannot get the res.body.token in the async call. I also tried

done(res.body.token);

But it said Error: done() invoked with non-Error: <token detail>.

So how can I get the token in the caller.

[boneskull]

  return res.body.token;
  done();

The above is a basic misunderstanding of programming. Once you return from a function, any subsequent lines within the function are unreachable.

I'm not sure really what I'm looking at here. Is utils.js code under test, a fixture, or what? If you need to call some async function and get its return value:

describe('foo', function() {
  var response;
  beforeEach(function(done) {
    someAsyncCall(function(err, data) {
      response = data;
      done();
    });
  });
  it('should blah blah', function() {
    // use response here
  });
});

[schatekar]

@boneskull How would you do this if beforeEach is defined in a helper file to be used across multiple specs?

[boneskull]

@schatekar do what..?

[schatekar]

If I have defined beforeEach in a separate file then how do I return value of response variable set inside beforeEach back to my specs?