Question

I have been using unit testing for controllers with the ‘poor man’s’ dependency injection technique. Each controller inherits from a base controller to query data for the master page. How do I unit test the controller with it inheriting from base controller without hitting the database?

public class HomeController : BaseController {     IUserRepository _userRepository;      public HomeController() : this(new UserRepository()) {      }      public HomeController(IUserRepository userRepository) {         _userRepository = userRepository;     } }  public class BaseController : Controller {     protected override void Execute(System.Web.Routing.RequestContext requestContext)     {         MyDataContext db = new MyDataContext();          ViewData['masterPageData'] = db.GetSomeData();          base.Execute(requestContext);     } } 

Answer 1

Code would look something like this:

public class HomeController : BaseController {     IUserRepository _userRepository;     public HomeController() : this(new UserRepository()) { }     public HomeController(IUserRepository userRepository) : base() {         _userRepository = userRepository;     }     public HomeController(IUserRepository userRepository, ISomeRepository someRepository) : base(someRepository) {         _userRepository = userRepository;     } } public class BaseController : Controller {     ISomeRepository _someRepository;     public BaseController(ISomeRepository someRepository)     {         _someRepository = someRepository;     }     public BaseController()     {         _someRepository = new SomeRepository();     }     protected override void Execute(System.Web.Routing.RequestContext requestContext)     {         MyDataContext db = new MyDataContext();         ViewData['masterPageData'] = _someRepository.GetSomeData();         base.Execute(requestContext);     } } 

That said, if you use a DI framework, you would only need 1 constructor in each class. So you can see how it starts leaning towards using one :).