Question

How can i unit test the view of an ASP MVC application?

I have tried the mvc contrib test helper…

 _controller.Index().AssertViewRendered();

but this doesn’t actually test the view.

for example i can happily insert some bogus code in the view, and get the dreaded yellow screen of death, without my unit test ever knowing about it.

Is there any estabilished method of doing this? Do i need a mock out the view engine? Does mvccontrib cater to this?

I would have thought this would be a very common requirement, but i can’t find much about it!

Thanks

EDIT
What i’m really after is compile time checking, to ensure that model changes don’t impact the view.

this question contained the instructions to enable build time view compilation which is sufficient for me for now. Compile Views in ASP.NET MVC

Answer 1

There are 3 options:

1. You want to unit test the code in the view. In this case, you have to move the code to the controller, because it’s not the responsibility of the view to have this code.
2. You want to be sure the view is actually shown in the browser. Use an browser UI testing tool like waitin or selenium. This does not create an isolated test of the view, but of large parts of your application. That sounds like an advantage, but is there any value in an isolated test of a view?
3. You want to test that code in your view is compilable code. Then compile the code. This can be done in a unit test, by manually calling view.compile or by turning on the view compiler in the build process.