Get Response body from play.api.mvc.Action[AnyContent] in Play framework (Scala)

Question

I have the following Play (Scala) code:

object Experiment extends Controller {

 //routes file directs /genki here
 def genki(name: String) = Action(pipeline(name))

 def pipeline(name: String) = {
   req:play.api.mvc.RequestHeader => {
      val template = views.html.genki(name)
      Experiment.Status(200).apply(template).as("text/html")
   }
 }

 def simple = Action {
   SimpleResult(
      header = ResponseHeader(200, Map(CONTENT_TYPE -> "text/plain")),
      body = Enumerator("Hello World!".getBytes())
   )
 }

}

This compiles fine and works as expected.

Using the scala REPL how can I display the actual html?

I have:

 scala> val action = simple
 action: play.api.mvc.Action[play.api.mvc.AnyContent] = Action(parser=BodyParser(anyContent))    

which I take to mean that now the value reference 'action' in the REPL is an Action object which is type-constrained for AnyContent (is that correct way to say it?).

how can I now use this Action to print out the Http Response html content?

Many thanks

Answer 1

Rather than the manual result extraction vptheron describes, you can use play.api.test.Helpers:

import play.api.test.Helpers._
val result: Future[SimpleResult] = …
val bodyAsBytes: Array[Byte] = contentAsBytes(result)

There's also contentAsString etc.

Answer 2

Building on the answer by Huw, here is the full working code:

import play.api.test._  
def getStringFromAction(action:Action[AnyContent]):String = {
  val request = new FakeRequest("fakeMethod", "fakeUrl", new FakeHeaders, "fakeBody")
  val result = action.apply(request).run
  import scala.concurrent.duration._
  Helpers.contentAsString(result)(1000 millis)
}

You will need to include the following libraries (not included by default in Play): play-test_2.11.jar, selenium-java.jar, selenium-api.jar, selenium-chrome-driver.jar, selenium-firefox-driver.jar, selenium-remote-driver.jar, selenium-htmlunit-driver.jar, fluentlenium-core.jar, htmlunit-core-js.jar and htmlunit.jar. These are available in the Play or Activator distribution. You can also add a dependency in build.sbt as explained here.