Question

I was just wondering how others are going about testing controller actions in asp.net mvc? Most of my dependencies are injected in to my controllers so there is a not a huge amount of logic in the action methods but there may be some conditional logic for example which I think is unavoidable.

In the past I have written tests for these action methods, mocked the dependencies and tested the results. I have found this is very brittle and a real PITA to maintain. Having ‘Expect’ and ‘Stub’ methods everywhere breaks very easily but I don’t see any other way of testing controller actions.

I actually think it might be easier to test some of these manually! Anyone have any suggestions? Perhaps I am missing something here?

Thanks

Imran

Answer 1

i don’t think i’ve writtin a single test for a controller because all of my logic is elsewhere. Like you say the controllers have a minimum amount of code in them and any logic in them is so simple that it really doesn’t bear a whole test strategy.

i prefer to give my models a whole lot of tests as well as any supporting code like DTL’s and data layers etc.

i think i’ve seen some people mock up their copntollers, pass in the expected models and look at the resultant output but i’m not sure how much that gives you.

i think if i were to test a controller i’d only really test the post actions to ensure that what is being given to my controller is what i’m getting in my model as well as testing (security). But then I have security in a number of places of varying levels.

but all that is integration testing more than functional. functional i do elsewhere like i said earlier.

then again, if it’s worth writing then it’s worth testing huh? I guess you need to decide what and where the breakable bits are and how you want them tested.