Writing unit and integration tests for Azure Functions is super critical to the development experience, since their execution relies on context variables and are beyond your control and supplied by the runtime. Furthermore, currently there is no local development or debugging experience available for Azure Functions. Therefore, testing if your functions behave properly, in the context of their runtime, is extremely critical to catch defects and increase your productivity.
Because Node.js is dynamically-typed, I want to share a quick trick on how to mimick the Azure Functions runtime context in order to test your functions. I did not find any documentation from Microsoft related to unit testing Node.js Azure Functions, so feel free to comment on the approach I propose here.
As an example, we are going to make a function that posts an observation every minute to Azure IoT Hub:
deviceSimulator/index.js
Now we want to write a unit/integration test for this function.
deviceSimulator/test.js
The function getContextObject simply returns an object the mimics the context object expected by the Azure Functions runtime. The test will simply import your function from index.js, create the mock-up context object and feed it to your function for execution. Finally, within your test, you can override the context.done() function to do the assertions you need and call done();
Is this the proper way to test Azure Functions on Node.js? I will let the Functions Product Group comment on that :). However, this method works for me.
The other alternative you have is to create your inside (internal) functions on other files that you can test separately in the traditional way you would test JS code, and import those files in your index.js file. The problem I see with that approach is, if your internal functions make a call to the context object, your tests will probably fail because of this.
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