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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-20T00:19:52+00:00

I am new to specflow and a have a doubt about how to mock

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I am new to specflow and a have a doubt about how to mock my
controller dependencies.
For instance I have a UserController class which depends on my
UserRepository class that a pass to the controller class on its
constructor.
So using Moq I am doing something like this:

var mock = new Mock<UserRepository>();
mock.Setup(m => m.ListAll()).Returns(new List<User>());
var browser = new IE(string.Format("http://localhost:4265/{0}",
username));

But my controller is not using the mocked object, how should I do
that?

Thanks

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You are mixing three (atleast) test framework, which ofcourse is cool, but you should probably stop and consider what it is you want to test.

    Watin is good for testing your UI as it controls a browser instance. I find it good at making regression tests http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_testing

    Specflow is great as well – personally i like to use it for closing the gap between business developers and (us) software developers as we can actually define requirements in terms we both understand (and probably other parts of the organization as well) I don’t want to start a flame war, but it can introduce more problems than it solves, unless you focus on its real values. We use this at work by testing the service layer (one layer below the controllers in the presentation layer) and we actually only mock the database, external services and file system etc – which makes our specflow tests some kind of integration tests.

    Moq is a mocking framework and can ofcourse be used in any kind of tests (like i just let it slip we do) but this is such a great tool for unit testing.

    So to return to your question. If you want to make one test to find all your bugs, you’re in trouble 😉 I know you don’t want that – that was just a silly suggestion i made – but really, if you just want to do integration tests (tests running from the UI down through several layers/dependencies) you could easily mix different testing frameworks like you are now, but then why mock the user repository? Is that because you don’t want to hit the database?

    Anyways one way to do the integration test you seem like you want would be to configure your solution to use a mock – or perhaps a stub would do (create a fake userrepository that returns the data you want to test with) – you should use a Dependency framework like Unity, Ninject or structure map (boy let’s not start a war about what framework to use) and have the test url Watin is using launch your site using a configuration with the fake/mock repositories.

    You could on the other hand do unit testing on your controllers, services etc. You might even want to try out TDD but that’s a whole other chapter i can’t cover here!

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