Integration tests state setup

The bigger the test suite for integration tests becomes, the harder it's to achieve a certain state for a test case. Opening this issue as a ground for discussion on how things could be improved.

As an example, checking if a certain record belongs to a specific relational filter takes to look up:

1. posts collection in base.json,
2. compare it with records in many-to-many.json
3. go back to base.json and check tags collection there

When there are multiple records/properties matching this 3 step process becomes over cumbersome.

One of the thoughts around making things easier to check would be not having a global state like base.json but a set of helper functions that would set up the state in few steps. The downside of this approach is more work in the test case setup, but than it's a lot more clear which cases are being expected to be returned. Hard to find a good middle ground here 🤷‍♂️

Don't have any specific recepie and current approach is good enough :) Just opening this issue as a discussion to try improve future test suite maintenance and development.

Start by reviewing the integration-test fixtures in base.json and many-to-many.json, then trace the tests that use them to understand the current state setup. This issue has no specific implementation target; done would require an agreed approach for making test state easier to define and maintain.