Question

I am writing a class to help me unit test my code. It looks like this:

/// <summary>
/// Wrapper for the LogManager class to allow us to stub the logger
/// </summary>
public class Logger
{
    private static ILogger _logger = null;

    /// <summary>
    /// This should be called to get a valid logger.
    /// </summary>
    /// <returns>A valid logger to log issues to file.</returns>
    public static ILogger GetLogger()
    {
        if (_logger == null)
          _logger = LogManager.GetLogger("logger");

        return _logger;
    }

    /// <summary>
    /// This is used by unit tests to allow a stub to be used as a logger.
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="logger"></param>
    /// <returns></returns>
    public static ILogger GetLogger(ILogger logger)
    {
        _logger = logger;
        return _logger;
    }
}

The second method is for unit testing only. I never intend to have it called in my production code.

Is this bad practice? Should I find another way that does not do this?

Answer 1

You could consider this:

/// <summary>
/// Wrapper for the LogManager class to allow us to stub the logger
/// </summary>
public class Logger
{
    private static ILogger _logger = null;

    /// <summary>
    /// This should be called to get a valid logger.
    /// </summary>
    /// <returns>A valid logger to log issues to file.</returns>
    public static ILogger Logger
    {
        get
        {
            if (_logger == null)
            {
                _logger = LogManager.GetLogger("logger");
            }
            return _logger
        }
        set
        {
            _logger = value;
        }
    }
}

It sets the logger the first time the getter is called if it’s not already set using the setter.