Test Driven MVC and ECO

I have decided that mocking IEcoServiceProvider is not the way to go. Your controller will use the mocked provider during testing but

 
1. You don’t want to have to mock every service the provider may return, it’s a lot of work!

 
2. You don’t want your controller using a mocked service, and then the EcoSpace using the real one!

At first I was mocking every possible service request. IUndoService, IPersistenceService, IOclService, etc. I get bored typing them out in this blog, so doing it in tests was really annoying me. I decided I would instead only mock the service in question. So if I were ensuring that an action wont save an object with broken constraints I would mock GetEcoService<IConstraintProvider> and ensure that I always got a broken constraint.

The problem was that the test to ensure I can save a valid object would then invoke the IPersistenceService.UpdateDatabaseWithList method. In my EcoSpace I have decorated my persistence service so that it checks every object in the update list to ensure it has no invalid constraints. At the point it asks for IConstraintProvider it is using the real IEcoServiceProvider and as a result it gets the real IConstraintProvider. In short the object would only save if it were really valid, and not if my mocked constraint provider pretended it was.

Ultimately I found it much easier just to register the mock service on the EcoSpace. To do this all I had to do was to expose a public method on the EcoSpace like so

#if DEBUG
 public void RegisterMockService(type serviceType, object serviceInstance)
 {
  RegisterEcoService(serviceType, serviceInstance);
 }
#endif

Now I can replace any service on the EcoSpace, so even the EcoSpace itself will get mocked services during testing. This is a lot less work!


Talking of a lot less work, although I was initially annoyed that the new field test for the ASP .NET web extensions had switched from using interfaces back over to using objects it turns out that testing is actually much easier than it was previously. Scott Hanselman posted some testing classes on his blog recently, it came out all screwy so I will repost the corrected version below (I hope he doesn’t mind). Testing is now as easy as this...

[TestClass]
public class AccountTests
{
 //This is a descendant of my real EcoSpace,
 //but I replace the persistence mapper with
 //PersistenceMapperMemory after construction so that
 //no DB access is needed.
 MemoryEcoSpace EcoSpace;
 AccountController Controller;
 MockRepository Mocks;
 FakeViewEngine FakeViewEngine;

 [TestInitialize]
 public void SetUp()
 {
  EcoSpace = new MemoryEcoSpace();
  EcoSpace.Active = true;

  Mocks = new MockRepository();
  FakeViewEngine = new FakeViewEngine();
  Controller = new AccountController();
  Controller.ViewEngine = FakeViewEngine;
  using (Mocks.Record())
  {
   Mocks.SetFakeControllerContext(Controller);
  }
 }

 [TestMethod]
 public void Create()
 {
  using (Mocks.Playback())
  {
   Controller.Create();
   Assert.AreEqual("Create", FakeViewEngine.ViewContext.ViewName);
  }
 }

 [TestMethod]
 public void CreateUpdate_ConfirmationEmailDoesNotMatch()
 {
  using (Mocks.Playback())
  {
   Controller.CreateUpdate("Mr", "Peter", "Morris", "me@home.com", "");
   Assert.IsTrue(ValidationHelper.ErrorExists(Controller.ViewData, NotASausageWebsite.Constants.ErrorMessages.ConfirmationEmailAddressDoesNotMatchEmailAddress));
  }
 }
}


public static class ValidationHelper
{
 public static bool ErrorExists(IDictionary<string, object> viewData, string errorMessage)
 {
  if (!viewData.ContainsKey(NotASausageWebsite.Constants.ViewDataKeys.Global.ErrorMessages))
   return false;
  List<string> errors = (List<string>)viewData[NotASausageWebsite.Constants.ViewDataKeys.Global.ErrorMessages];
  return errors.IndexOf(errorMessage) >= 0;
 }
}

Nice and easy! If you want the testing code from Scott here it is:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Web;
using Rhino.Mocks;
using System.Web.Mvc;
using System.Web.Routing;
using System.Collections.Specialized;

namespace Tests.Helpers
{
    public static class MvcMockHelpers
    {
        public static HttpContextBase FakeHttpContext(this MockRepository mocks)
        {
            HttpContextBase context = mocks.PartialMock<HttpContextBase>();
            HttpRequestBase request = mocks.PartialMock<HttpRequestBase>();
            HttpResponseBase response = mocks.PartialMock<HttpResponseBase>();
            HttpSessionStateBase session = mocks.PartialMock<HttpSessionStateBase>();
            HttpServerUtilityBase server = mocks.PartialMock<HttpServerUtilityBase>();

            SetupResult.For(context.Request).Return(request);
            SetupResult.For(context.Response).Return(response);
            SetupResult.For(context.Session).Return(session);
            SetupResult.For(context.Server).Return(server);

            mocks.Replay(context);
            return context;
        }

        public static HttpContextBase FakeHttpContext(this MockRepository mocks, string url)
        {
            HttpContextBase context = FakeHttpContext(mocks);
            context.Request.SetupRequestUrl(url);
            return context;
        }

        public static void SetFakeControllerContext(this MockRepository mocks, Controller controller)
        {
            var httpContext = mocks.FakeHttpContext();
            ControllerContext context = new ControllerContext(new RequestContext(httpContext, new RouteData()), controller);
            controller.ControllerContext = context;
        }

        static string GetUrlFileName(string url)
        {
            if (url.Contains("?"))
                return url.Substring(0, url.IndexOf("?"));
            else
                return url;
        }

        static NameValueCollection GetQueryStringParameters(string url)
        {
            if (url.Contains("?"))
            {
                NameValueCollection parameters = new NameValueCollection();

                string[] parts = url.Split("?".ToCharArray());
                string[] keys = parts[1].Split("&amp;".ToCharArray());

                foreach (string key in keys)
                {
                    string[] part = key.Split("=".ToCharArray());
                    parameters.Add(part[0], part[1]);
                }

                return parameters;
            }
            else
            {
                return null;
            }
        }

        public static void SetHttpMethodResult(this HttpRequestBase request, string httpMethod)
        {
            SetupResult.For(request.HttpMethod).Return(httpMethod);
        }

        public static void SetupRequestUrl(this HttpRequestBase request, string url)
        {
            if (url == null)
                throw new ArgumentNullException("url");

            if (!url.StartsWith("~/"))
                throw new ArgumentException("Sorry, we expect a virtual url starting with \"~/\".");

            SetupResult.For(request.QueryString).Return(GetQueryStringParameters(url));
            SetupResult.For(request.AppRelativeCurrentExecutionFilePath).Return(GetUrlFileName(url));
            SetupResult.For(request.PathInfo).Return(string.Empty);
        }
       
    }
}



 public class FakeViewEngine : IViewEngine
 {
  public void RenderView(ViewContext viewContext)
  {
   ViewContext = viewContext;
  }

  public ViewContext ViewContext { get; private set; }

 }