Specflow and Eventual Consistency

2021-05-30 Testing

SpecFlow is a tool which can be used to describe test scenarios and automate the tests. Although I have been using SpecFlow for a while now I never used it for advanced examples where time might be an issue. Lets show a simple example scenario first. A scenario, written in Gherkin, looks like this:

Scenario: Add simple item with due date
    Given the user enters "wash my car"
    And the user adds a due date of "1-1-2022"
    When the user saves the item
    Then the item "wash my car" is added to the list
    And the due date is "1-1-2022"

This scenario is easy to implement, the item will be added and stored. That’s it. Easy to verify, no delays, straight forward. But what if you have some microservices with a queueing mechanism? A scenario where data will be queued before processing so we can’t exactly know when the data is processed?

Retry and fallback policies in C# with Polly

2019-04-18

In this blog I will try to explain how one can create clean and effective policies to retry API calls and have fallbacks when requests are failing. With Polly it is possible to create complex and advanced scenarios for error handling with just a few lines of code.

This week I was connecting an eCommerce web application to an ERP system with REST APIs. There are multiple endpoints, all authenticated with OAuth. To make sure all calls to the APIs will have a high success rate I had to implement retry mechanisms for different scenarios.