No res.body received from GET

I am testing a Node.js API with supertest, and the res.body object superset returns is empty. The data shows up in the res.text object, but not res.body. This appears to be a bug, as the exact same code works in a similar project.

I am using Express and body-parser:

app.use(bodyParser.json());
app.use(bodyParser.json({ type: jsonMimeType }));
app.use(bodyParser.urlencoded({ extended: true }));

Here is the API method I am testing:

app.get(apiPath + '/menu', function(req, res) {
  var expiration = getExpiration();

  res.set({
    'Content-Type': jsonMimeType,
    'Content-Length': jsonTestData.length,
    'Last-Modified': new Date(),
    'Expires': expiration,
    'ETag': null
  });

  res.json({ items: jsonTestData });
}

Here are the tests I am executing against this API method:

describe('GET /menu', function() {
  describe('HTTP headers', function() {
    it('responds with the right MIME type', function(done) {
      request(app)
        .get(apiPath + '/menu')
        .set('Accept', 'application/vnd.burgers.api+json')
        .expect('Content-Type', 'application/vnd.burgers.api+json; charset=utf-8')
        .expect(200, done);
    });

    it('responds with the right expiration date', function(done) {
      var tomorrow = new Date();
      tomorrow.setDate(tomorrow.getDate() + 1);
      tomorrow.setHours(0,0,0,0);

      request(app)
        .get(apiPath + '/menu')
        .set('Accept', 'application/vnd.burgers.api+json; charset=utf-8')
        .expect('Expires', tomorrow.toUTCString())
        .expect(200, done);
    });

    it('responds with menu items', function(done) {
      request(app)
        .get(apiPath + '/menu')
        .set('Accept', 'application/vnd.burgers.api+json; charset=utf-8')
        .expect(200)
        .expect(function (res) {
          console.log(res);
          res.body.items.length.should.be.above(0);
        })
        .end(done);
    });
  });
});

The failure I receive:

1) GET /menu HTTP headers responds with menu items:
     TypeError: Cannot read property 'length' of undefined
      at /Users/brian/Development/demos/burgers/menu/test/MenuApiTest.js:42:25
      at Test.assert (/Users/brian/Development/demos/burgers/menu/node_modules/supertest/lib/test.js:213:13)
      at Server.assert (/Users/brian/Development/demos/burgers/menu/node_modules/supertest/lib/test.js:132:12)
      at Server.g (events.js:180:16)
      at Server.emit (events.js:92:17)
      at net.js:1276:10
      at process._tickDomainCallback (node.js:463:13)

And finally, here is an excerpt of the result of console.log(res):

...
text: '{"items":[{"id":"1","name":"cheeseburger","price":3},{"id":"2","name":"hamburger","price":2.5},{"id":"3","name":"veggie burger","price":3},{"id":"4","name":"large fries","price":2},{"id":"5","name":"medium fries","price":1.5},{"id":"6","name":"small fries","price":1},{"id":"7","name":"large drink","price":2.5},{"id":"8","name":"medium drink","price":2},{"id":"9","name":"small drink","price":1}]}',
  body: {},
...

[malthejorgensen]

@mikker The issue seems to have been resolved in a question on StackOverflow.

I have the same problem, and my Express application actually does return application/json; charset=utf-8 and yet the result doesn’t have a body property – only the text property. Strange.

[feyton]

Did you ever solve this?

I faced the same issue using Mocha on node js with Express. I used the expect function to run the test like this import chai, { expect } from "chai"; //omited code expect(res.body.data.length).to.eql(0) //call done()