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Asked: 2026-05-11T01:09:26+00:00

I’ve been trying for a while now to write a unit test for a

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I’ve been trying for a while now to write a unit test for a UserViewControl in ASP.NET MVC. I’d like to get to code that looks something like this:

[TestMethod] public void HaveControlToDisplayThings() {     var listControl = new ControlUnderTest();     var viewData = new ViewDataDictionary<IList<string>>(this.repo.GetMeSomeData());      // Set up a ViewContext using Moq.     listControl.SetFakeViewContext(viewData);     listControl.ViewData = viewData;     listControl.RenderView(listControl.ViewContext);      // Never got this far, no idea if this will work :)     string s = listControl.ViewContext.HttpContext.Response.Output.ToString();     Assert.AreNotEqual(0, s.Length);     foreach (var item in this.repo.GetMeSomeData())     {         Assert.IsTrue(s.IndexOf(item) != -1);     } }

Unfortunately, no matter what I try I get errors from deep inside RenderView. This is caused (as far as I can tell) by the static HttpContext.Current object being useless – I get NullReferenceExceptions from System.Web.UI.Page.SetIntrinsics.

I tried using Phil Haack’s HttpSimulator which gave me a HttpContext object but I found I also needed to specify a fake HttpBrowserCapabilities object to get slightly further:

Subtext.TestLibrary.HttpSimulator simulator = new HttpSimulator(); simulator.SimulateRequest(); var browserMock = new Mock<HttpBrowserCapabilities>(); browserMock.Expect(b => b.PreferredRenderingMime).Returns('text/html'); browserMock.Expect(b => b.PreferredResponseEncoding).Returns('UTF-8'); browserMock.Expect(b => b.PreferredRequestEncoding).Returns('UTF-8'); HttpContext.Current.Request.Browser = browserMock.Object;

Now I get exceptions on property accesses on that object. I mocked as many as I could, but seemed to be getting nowhere fast.

Has anyone managed to make this work?

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  1. Unfortunately, the ASP.NET viewengine uses the VirtualPathProvider in the ASP.NET hosting environment. To make matters worse, I traced some of the other code using Reflector and found that there is other dependencies to some hardcode references to VirtualPath utilities. I hope they fix this in the release so we can truly test our Views and how they are rendered.

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