A few weeks ago, our team made an important decision — we wanted to improve the quality of our Dynamics 365 CRM project by introducing unit testing. Until then, testing was mostly manual and relied heavily on functional testing inside the CRM environment. Unit testing felt like a natural next step.
Soon after the decision, I was assigned a task: create a proof of concept (PoC) for unit testing JavaScript (JScript) web resources used in Dynamics 365 CRM.
Note: I couldn’t find many simple blogs explaining how to do unit testing for JavaScript in Dynamics 365 CRM. So, I decided to share what I learned and document a simple approach that worked for me, mainly to help beginners get started.
At first, I was unsure how to approach it. In my mind, unit testing was something usually done in full‑stack applications, like React with Node.js or Angular projects. I had never written unit tests for plain JavaScript files used in CRM forms. This was new territory for me.
The Initial Challenge:
Like anyone starting something new, I began researching. A quick web search showed popular JavaScript testing frameworks like Jest, Mocha, and Jasmine. They looked powerful, well‑documented, and widely used.
But there was a catch.
Almost all of them required Node.js. Installing Node.js on my organization‑issued laptop meant raising a helpdesk ticket and waiting for admin approval. From experience, I knew this could easily take a week or more.
Since this was just a proof of concept, waiting that long didn’t feel efficient. I needed a simple, lightweight solution that didn’t require installing anything new.
A Different Way of Thinking
That’s when I paused and reflected on the nature of the problem.
Since these scripts already run in the browser, I started looking for browser‑friendly JavaScript unit testing frameworks - something that could work directly with an HTML file.
Discovering QUnit
During this search, I came across QUnit.
QUnit immediately stood out because it is:
- Lightweight and simple
- Designed for testing JavaScript in the browser
- Available via CDN
- Supports integration with mocking libraries
With QUnit, you just include a script reference in an HTML file, open it in the browser, and your tests run instantly.
That was exactly what I was looking for.
Setting Up the Proof of Concept
I created a simple project structure to demonstrate the idea.
- formScripts.js → One JavaScript file contained the CRM form logic (the actual code under test)
- tests.js → Another JavaScript file contained the unit test cases
- index.html → file loaded QUnit via CDN and referenced both scripts
By opening index.html in the browser, I could run all unit tests and see results immediately - pass, fail, and errors - all in a clean UI provided by QUnit. You can find my sample code below.
formScripts.js
tests.js
index.html
Later, I learned how to write test for the basic and necessary objects like executionContext, formContext, getValue and setValue. I ran the index.html file and the test runs showing up. You can refer the below image to see so.
This gave me enough confidence to share my findings with the team. I plan to continue working on this and will share more updates as I start implementing unit testing in the full project.
References:
Have a great day!