Need a .respond().withRawContent() or a way to ignore some directory in the "auto-reload"

[hilsonp]

imposter: 4.7.0
plugin: rest
scripting: groovy

We are using groovy script to compose responses
resources:

• method: POST
  response:
  scriptFile: request.retrieveDocument.groovy

In the request.retrieveDocument.groovy, we build a response that contain binary data (pdf). We MUST mimic our real provider so we cannot serve this Base64 encoded.

The way we do it is writing the bytes to a temporary file in the configDir, then respond with .withFile()
This works perfectly and the binary data is not corrupted.

    def currentDir = new File(getClass().protectionDomain.codeSource.location.path).parent + "/"
    def baos = new ByteArrayOutputStream()
    // here, we build the baos content... 
    def storageDir = new File("${currentDir}.temp_responses/")
    if (!storageDir.exists()) storageDir.mkdirs()

    // Deletes files in this folder older than 10 minutes to prevent disk bloat
    def now = System.currentTimeMillis()
    storageDir.listFiles().each { f ->
        if (now - f.lastModified() > 60000) f.delete()
    }

    def tempFile = File.createTempFile("invoice_resp_", ".bin", storageDir)
    tempFile.bytes = baos.toByteArray()
    logger.debug("Assembled multipart response saved to: ${tempFile.path}")

    //byte[] finalMultipartBody = baos.toByteArray()

    respond()
            .withStatusCode(httpStat)
            .withHeader('Content-Type', "multipart/related; boundary=\"${boundary}\"")
            .withFile(".temp_responses/" + tempFile.name)

The problem with this method is that we are writing in the configDir and therefore, imposter restarts.
We would like to keep the "auto-restart" as it makes our pipelines easier.

I tried writing the temp file somewere else than the configDir but got an security exception (which I fully understand).

We tried the .withContent() but this corrupts the content as it requires a String.

Would it be possible to add a .withContent() accepting byte[]
or accepting a .withRawContent() ?

Another solution would be to allow us to ignore some directories in the "auto-reload".

Any alternative is welcome.

Thank you very much.

[outofcoffee]

Hi @hilsonp, thank you for raising this.

A couple of quick thoughts on the script:

• the 60000 value looks like it might trigger after 1 minute, not 10?
• instead of new File(getClass().protectionDomain.codeSource.location.path).parent could you use the config.dir (of type java.io.File) instead?

I don't think we've seen many examples of writing to the config directory before; typically a store would be a good choice, as it works across more than one instance of the mock, and survives clean deployments.

We'll think about the raw content suggestion - I can see the use for it, but need to consider how best to implement it. A few things we might try include:

1. changing the internal representation of content to be a byte array, and detecting the type of the variable passed in to withContent, with a default to String unless it's a byte array
2. changing the internal representation of content to be a byte array, but having a separate withBytes method - this has the downside of adding to the API for script implementations, and we'd have to support this across all our script engine targets
3. adding a new bytes field to the response behaviour, and having a separate withBytes method, but in addition to the API change this would also need more logic in the response behaviour factory, response service etc.

Thanks again for sharing your use case. We'll experiment a bit and see what we can do here.

[hilsonp]

Hi @outofcoffee,

Thank you for the quick reply.

You're right. The temp files are cleaned every minute and not every 10 minutes.

I thought about a store but the impossibility to reply binary content from something else than a file would remains and therefore did not explore it.
In our case, we build the byte array on the fly so we actually would prefer not to store it at all.

I would vote for the first of your 3 proposals ;-)

Best regards,