Testing a multi-app solution in Altinn

How to test the multi-app solution while developing

How does testing with Maskinporten work

When interacting with Maskinporten in an application there are a few things to keep in mind.

First and foremost Samarbeidsportalen lets you maintain two different clients; one for test being ver2/test and another for production being prod. You should create both clients, but of course only use the test client for test, and prod client for production. Which client to use in which scenario, is decided by different configurations for the appsettings.{env}.json files. There are different access policies for creating these, so make sure you are aware of these limitations described at Samarbeidsportalen.

Second, since integrating this client with an Altinn app relies on authorizing through public and private keys (JWT) stored as Azure secrets, you will need access to the Azure Key vault of the organization owning the applications.

What can be done in Studio

The Studio support for developing multi-app solutions are currently very limited. Thus, the only help Studio can provide for you is the already supported single-app configurations. This means that you will only be able to build the individual applications and visualize the looks of them in the preview tool.

What can be done in app-localtest

When running the application locally in app-localtest you can test all the logic in application A until the point where the instantiation request to application B is triggered. The reason for this is that the AppClient tries to access the Azure key vault in order to get the secrets needed for authorization to Maskinporten. But the secrets needed to be allowed to access Azure key vault is not available when running in localtest.

However, there is a way to go around this, for testing purposes. The secrets needed, clientID and encodedJWT, for authorizing requests to Maskinporten can be copied from your organisations Azure key vault and temporarily be pasted into the appsettings.json file.

After this modification the application is set up correctly with a client that can be authorized with Maskinporten when sending the instantiation request to application B. However, this request will not be executed successfully due to application B is not running. App-localtest is limited to only handle one running application, but if application B is running in the environment, preferably in tt02 during test, you can change the request to point to this environment instead of local.altinn.cloud. This can be done by changing the envUrl in the AppClient.CreateNewInstance() method.

Change this line:

string envUrl = $"https://{org}.apps.{_settings.HostName}";

To this:

string envUrl = $"https://{org}.apps.tt02";

NB: Do not change the HostName variable in appsettings.json since this is used for other critical purposes as well.

Unless you are fine by injecting your organizations Altinn Innboks with testing instances of application B, you should adjust the receiver of the instance that is to be created in the instance template in application A. This is done by using PersonNumber instead of OrganisationNumber in the InstanceOwner part of the template object in ProcessTaskEnd.End() method. It is recommended to use a person number for a test user from Tenor test database. When testing if the application B form has come through you will need to log in to tt02.altinn.no with the same tenor test user.

What must be done in tt02

Before actually deploying the applications to production the forms should have been tested fully in tt02 with actual usage of Azure key vault and correct variable for the envUrl. This means that both applications should be tested while running in tt02. It is still possible to test with a tenor test user as the receiver of the instance, but an alternative is to ask for a test-organisation that can receive these forms. This can be done by sending a request to servicedesk@altinn.no.