Question

In MsTest if I need some file from another project for my test, I can specify DeploymentItem attribute. Is there anything similar in NUnit?

Answer 1

You should check out another thread that contrasts the capabilities of NUnit and MSTest.

The accepted answer here is misleading. NUnit does not offer the [DeploymentItem(“”)] attribute at all which is what @Idsa wanted an equivalent solution for in NUnit.

My guess is that this kind of attribute would violate the scope of NUnit as a “unit” testing framework as requiring an item to be copied to the output before running a test implies it has a dependency on this resource being available.

I’m using a custom attribute to copy over a localdb instance for running “unit” tests against some sizeable test data that I’d rather not generate with code everytime.

Now using the attribute [DeploymentItem(“some/project/file”)] will copy this resource from file system into the bin again effectively refreshing my source data per test method:

[AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.Method | AttributeTargets.Class | AttributeTargets.Struct, 
    AllowMultiple = false, 
    Inherited = false)]
public class DeploymentItem : System.Attribute {
    private readonly string _itemPath;
    private readonly string _filePath;
    private readonly string _binFolderPath;
    private readonly string _itemPathInBin;
    private readonly DirectoryInfo _environmentDir;
    private readonly Uri _itemPathUri;
    private readonly Uri _itemPathInBinUri;

    public DeploymentItem(string fileProjectRelativePath) {
        _filePath = fileProjectRelativePath.Replace("/", @"\");

        _environmentDir = new DirectoryInfo(Environment.CurrentDirectory);
        _itemPathUri = new Uri(Path.Combine(_environmentDir.Parent.Parent.FullName
            , _filePath));

        _itemPath = _itemPathUri.LocalPath;
        _binFolderPath = Path.GetDirectoryName(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location);

        _itemPathInBinUri = new Uri(Path.Combine(_binFolderPath, _filePath));
        _itemPathInBin = _itemPathInBinUri.LocalPath;

        if (File.Exists(_itemPathInBin)) {
            File.Delete(_itemPathInBin);
        }

        if (File.Exists(_itemPath)) {
            File.Copy(_itemPath, _itemPathInBin);
        }
    }
}

Then we can use like so:

[Test]
[DeploymentItem("Data/localdb.mdf")]
public void Test_ReturnsTrue() 
{
    Assert.IsTrue(true);
}