Question

I’ve got lots of unit tests which needs lots of txt, data, html etc. files. Externally storing these files makes life so much easier to update test cases adding new test cases etc.

However having dependencies in Unit Tests brings lots of headache in different systems and in different test runners.

What are the best practices?

1. Externally storing them and
   relatively linking these files in
   the code? (causing problems in some
   test runners, or requires extra
   configuration)
2. Embedding all these files in the
   Unit Test dlls and read from there
   (makes creating tests harder)
3. Storing in a hardcoded
   location(obviously causing so many
   problems when you check out the code
   in a different place)

How do you solve this problem?

Answer 1

I use a local folder in my test project and get the test files with code like:

public static FileInfo GetTestFileInfo(string fileName)
{
    var dir = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory;
    return new FileInfo(dir + @"\..\..\TestData\" + fileName);
}

Oh yes, I’m using MbUnit.