Question

I have the following methods in my Authentication class that is called by my controller. I know the controller can call the SetAuthCookie itself, but I’d prefer the additional abstraction.

public void FormsAuthSignIn(string loginName, bool rememberMe = false)
{
    FormsAuthentication.SetAuthCookie(loginName, rememberMe);
}

Just looking at FormsAuthentication in the object browser reveals no members that I can use to see if this has worked? Should I build a test controller using the Authorize attribute and call a method on it inside my test? What should I do here?

Answer 1

I believe that the only thing to be unit tested here is that SetAuthCookie was called with the right parameters. You don’t need to test FormsAuthentication‘s logic.

This can be achieved by hiding FormsAuthentication behind an interface, and implementing your own stub for it just for tests, that will count calls on methods.
Any mocking framework will help you with this task, while Moles / Typemock Isolator and such will allow you to mock SetAuthCookie directly.

Beyond that, IMHO, in this case:

public class MyClass
{
    public int Foo()
    {
        return Bar();
    }

    private int Bar()
    {
        return BarInner();
    }

    private int BarInner()
    {
        return BarInnerer();
    }

    private int BarInnerer()
    {
        return 42;
    }
}

Only Foo should get tested – all the other methods are an implementation detail.
Same as in this case – There should be a test for the caller of FormsAuthSignIn, that asserts that FormsAuthSignIn is called in the right cases.