Question

A controller in my ASP.NET MVC application pre-populates form data displayed by my view according to a couple of fairly straight forward rules.

It seems like this would be a good thing to cover in my unit testing. But the only way I could see to verify the correct data is placed in the form, would be to extract the logic from the controller in what feels like an unnatural way.

Can someone suggest ways to approach this?

All the examples I’ve found of unit testing controllers seemed very trivial, such as verifying it returned the expected type of view. I’m not sure I even see the value in that.

Answer 1

You can test by casting the returned object to the appropriate class, instead of using their base class (which is returned by default)

For example, to test the default AccountController you’d so something like this:

var controller = new AccountController();
var result = controller.LogOn() as ViewResult;
var model = result.Model as LogOnModel;

Assert.IsTrue(model.RememberMe); // assuming you "pre-populated" enabled the checkbox

Checking if the returned object is filled with the right data does not seem “unnatural” to me, or did you meant it differently?