Question

Basically I want to set 20 or so Request.Form values, send a POST to my controller, and then check the result.

I found a couple articles such as this one which describe how you can do this with a combination of NUnit, MVCContrib, and Rhino Mocks. But I don’t know if this is truly necessary.

It would seem that Visual Studio 2010 and ASP.NET MVC 2 should be able to do this natively and display the results in the little “Test Results” window. In fact, when I create a new unit test with the wizard, it comes up with this…

[TestMethod()]
[HostType("ASP.NET")]
[AspNetDevelopmentServerHost("G:\\Webs\\MyWebsite.com\\MyWebsite", "/")]
[UrlToTest("http://localhost:43383/")]
public void PaypalIPNTest()
{
    BuyController target = new BuyController(); // TODO: Initialize to an appropriate value
    ActionResult expected = new EmptyResult(); // TODO: Initialize to an appropriate value
    ActionResult actual;
    actual = target.PaypalIPN();
    Assert.AreEqual(expected, actual);
    Assert.Inconclusive("Verify the correctness of this test method.");
}

Is it possible to feed target.PaypalIPN() my Request.Form variables based on the above code? Or do I need to rely on 3rd party libraries to get this done?

Answer 1

In fact, when I create a new unit test with the wizard, it comes up with this

Yes, and all that you can keep from this is the method signature. The method body is useless.

So let’s start by looking at this:

Is it possible to feed target.PaypalIPN() my Request.Form variables

By reading this sentence I assume that your controller action looks something like this:

[HttpPost]
public ActionResult PaypalIPN()
{
    string foo = Request["foo"];
    string bar = Request["bar"];
    ... do something with foo and bar
}

So the first is to improve this code by introducing view models:

public class MyViewModel
{
    public string Foo { get; set; }
    public string Bar { get; set; }
}

and then modify your method signature to:

[HttpPost]
public ActionResult PaypalIPN(MyViewModel model)
{
    ... do something with model.Foo and model.Bar
}

Now your controller is abstracted from any HttpContext infrastructure code (which really should be left to the framework, it is not your controller actions responsibility to read request parameters => that’s plumbing code) and unit testing it is really a simple matter:

[TestMethod()]
public void PaypalIPNTest()
{
    // arrange
    var sut = new BuyController();
    var model = new MyViewModel
    {
        Foo = "some foo",
        Bar = "some bar",
    };

    // act
    var actual = sut.PaypalIPN(model);

    // assert
    // TODO:
}

OK, this being said, here we dealt with some really simple controller action. For more advanced scenarios you really should consider using a mocking framework. Personally I use MvcContrib.TestHelper with Rhino Mocks to unit test my ASP.NET MVC applications.