Question

I am working on a lib that I want to release in open source. I have started writing the tests for the code, and I was wondering how I am suppose to test a property in a .Net object. Lets say I have the following:

  public class Person{     #region variables     private string _name = String.Empty;     private string _surname = String.Empty;     #region properties     public string Name{         get{              return _name;         }     }     public string Surname{         get{             return _surname;         }         set{             _surname = value;         }     } }  

I have two questions related to the code:

1. How do I Unit test a Property that just has a getter (Like Name in the example)
2. How do I Unit test a Property with a setter and a getter (Like Surname in the example)

I want to test properties that are that simple because I have already found errors in other code were Itellinsense did the wrong autocomplete and the property was not returning the correct variable.

Update:

I am not talking about simple properties as the one in the example, they do have some logic behind them and are quite hard to debug. Writing a test that uses the setter to test the getter and vice versa is not good because if there is a fail I won’t know which method to blame. I am using properties because they were added as public variables and later more logic had to be added.

Answer 1

How do I Unit test a Property that just has a getter (Like Name in the example)

Really not so different from testing if you had a setter. you’ll just need to find another way of determining the output. Could be in a ctor, or the result of other setters/operations on the object.

[Test] public void NamePropTest() {     Person p = new Person();      //Some code here that will set up the Person object     //  so that you know what the name will be      Assert.AreEqual('some known value...', p.Name); } 

If we had setters for Name and SurName, but only a getter for FullName, the test could look like this:

[Test] public void NamePropTest() {     Person p = new Person();      p.Name = 'Sean';     p.Surname = 'Penn';      Assert.AreEqual('Sean Penn', p.FullName); }