i'm new in web dev and have following questions
I have Web Site project. I have one datacontext class in App_Code folder which contains methods for working with database (dbml schema is also present there) and methods which do not directly interfere with db. I want to test both kind of methods using NUnit.
As Nunit works with classes in .dll or .exe i understood that i will need to either convert my entire project to a Web Application, or move all of the code that I would like to test (ie: the entire contents of App_Code) to a class library project and reference the class library project in the web site project.
If i choose to move methods to separate dll, the question is how do i test those methods there which are working with data base? :
Will i have to create a connection to
db in "setup" method before running
each of such methods? Is this correct that there is no need to run web appl in this case?
Or i need to run such tests during
runtime of web site when the
connection is established? In this case how to setup project and Nunit?
or some another way..
Second if a method is dependent on some setup in my .config file, for instance some network credentials or smtp setup, what is the approach to test such methods?
I will greatly appreciate any help!
The more it's concrete the better it is.
Thanks.
Generally, you should be mocking your database rather than really connecting to it for your unit tests. This means that you provide fake data access class instances that return canned results. Generally you would use a mocking framework such as Moq or Rhino to do this kind of thing for you, but lots of people also just write their own throwaway classes to serve the same purpose. Your tests shouldn't be dependent on the configuration settings of the production website.
There are many reasons for doing this, but mainly it's to separate your tests from your actual database implementation. What you're describing will produce very brittle tests that require a lot of upkeep.
Remember, unit testing is about making sure small pieces of your code work. If you need to test that a complex operation works from the top down (i.e. everything works between the steps of a user clicking something, getting data from a database, and returning it and updating a UI), then this is called integration testing. If you need to do full integration testing, it is usually recommended that you have a duplicate of your production environment - and I mean exact duplicate, same hardware, software, everything - that you run your integration tests against.
Related
At the moment, I'm using two different frameworks for REST APIs integration testing, and load/stress testing. Respectively : geb (or cucumber) and gatling. But most of the time, I'm re-writing some pieces of code in load / performance scenarii that I've been writing for integration testing.
So the question is : is there a framework (running on the JVM) or simply a way, to write integration tests (for a strict REST API use case), preferably programmatically, then assemble load testing scenarios using these integration tests.
I've read cucumber maybe could do that, but I'm lacking a proper example.
The requirements :
write integration tests programmatically
for any integration test, have the ability to "extract" values (the same way gatling can extract json paths for instance)
assemble the integration tests in a load test scenario
If anyone has some experience to share, I'd be happy to read any blog article, GitHub repository, or whatever source dealing with such an approach.
Thanks in advance for your help.
It sounds like you want to extract a library that you use both for your integration tests as well as your load test.
Both tools you are referring to are able to use external jar.
Suppose that you use Maven or Gradle as build tool, create a new module that you refer to from both your integration tests and your load tests. Place all interaction logic in this new module. This should allow you to reuse the code you need.
A pretty common problem with any kind of integration test is getting the unit under test into a known state -- the state that sets up well for the test you want to perform. With a unit test, there's usually not much state, and the only issue is in potentially mocking out interactions with other classes.
On the other hand, when testing a whole app there's all sorts of potentially persistent state, and getting the app into a clean state, or trickier still, into a known state that isn't "clean" without any access to the app itself is a little tricky.
The only suggestion I've found is to embed any necessary setup in the app, and use something like an environment variable to trigger setup. That is, of course, viable, but it's not ideal. I don't really want to embed test code and test data in my final application if I can avoid it.
And then there's mocking out interactions with remote services. Again you can embed code (or even a framework) to do that, and trigger it with an environment variable, but again I don't love the idea of embedding stubbing code into the final app.
Suggestions? I haven't been able to find much, which makes me wonder if no-one is using Xcode UI testing, or is only using it for incredibly simple apps that don't have these kinds of issues.
Unfortunately, the two suggestions you mentioned are the only ones that are possible with Xcode UI Testing in its current state.
There is, however, one thing you can do to mitigate the risk of embedding test code in your production app. With the help of a few compiler flags you can ensure the specific code is only built when running on the simulator.
#if (arch(i386) || arch(x86_64)) && os(iOS)
class SeededHTTPClient: HTTPClientProtocol {
/// ... //
}
#endif
I'm in the middle of building something to make this a little easier. I'll report back when its ready for use.
Regarding setting up the state on the target app there's a solution. Both the test runner app and your app can read and write to the simulator /Library/Caches folder. Knowing that you can bundle fixture data in your test bundle, copy it to the /Library/Caches on setUp() and pass a launch argument to your application to use that fixture data.
This only requires minimal changes to your app. You only need to prepare it to handle this argument at startup and copy over everything to your app container.
If you want to read more about this, or how you can do the same when running on the device, I've actually written a post on it.
Regarding isolating your UI tests from the network, I think the best solution is to embed a web server on your test bundle and have your app connect to it (again you can use a launch argument parameterize your app). You can use Embassy for that.
Is it possible using EF6 Code First and MVC5 to put all the models, views, and controllers that involve ASP.Identity into its own class library project. So that over multiple web applications you could use that same DLL and already have all the views / controllers / models and be using the same security database for multiple applications?
We have several web applications with separate databases and one security database that handles all of them, and we weren't sure how to keep this model now that we're moving to EF6 Code First and MVC5.
If it is possible could someone point me to a tutorial of something similar or give me a basic outline of steps to go through?
Or if there is a better way to achieve my goal, of having one set of code to handle ASP.NET-Identity security that I can plug that dll into multiple web applications and get the same logic and databases?
Or is this not a good idea in general?
Very open to suggestion and advice. I appreciate it.
Yes it is. We do this with every project that we have. The structure is very simple. Just create a class library project to your solution, add EF to the project, then reference the class library from your main project.
If using Code First Migrations be sure to select the class library project as the default project in the Package Manager console when running migrations or adding migrations.
Here is a pseudo solution structure for your solution
MySolution
- MyWebApp
reference: MyDAL
-MyDAL
reference: EF6
The advantage that I find to this is that you can then reference the "DAL" class library from say a companion console application or windows form application, or a companion website, even in a different solution, and they will use the same code base.
For example:
MySolution
- MyWebApp
reference: MyDAL
- MyDAL
reference: EF6
- MyOtherWebApp
reference: MyDAL
NOTE: Your data context will look for its connection string in the Web.config or App.config in the startup project. NOT the class library. This can be confusing at first... But once you think about how .NET compiles the application together into the final package, it makes sense.
If you're talking about creating one class library for an entire data layer shared between multiple projects, then that's easy enough. You can move all your models, your context, etc. into a class library and run migrations using the class library project. The other projects will just reference that class library and not have migrations of their own.
However, if you're talking about multiple databases and associated data layers, where project Foo has its own models, context and migrations and project Bar has its own models, context and migrations, while the class library has just the IdentityUser and IdentityDbContext, things get a little more complicated. You won't be able to combine any of these contexts. So in your Foo project you'd have to instantiate your context for Foo and your Identity context if you need to work with both. It's not a problem, per se, but it's something to be aware of.
I have a database project in Visual Studio 2012 with SSDT (latest as of this writing). In the database project, I have a schema called "UNITTEST" which contains tons of stored procedures that create, destroy, and provide other helper functionality for the unit tests. We do this because it gives us the ability to control our test data centrally rather than inside each unit test. Now that's fine and all however, I don't want to publish this schema or any of the objects inside of this schema to production.
So my question.. Is there a way to stop SSDT/VS2012 from including the UNITTEST schema in the production build deployment script?
I'm thinking there should be a way to do it depending on the solution configuration settings and publish profiles. If my configuration is set to "Release" then I want the build to perform a bit differently.
Builds are very new to me. I found this question: build-different-scripts-depending-on-build-configuration but I can't seem to get the answer to fulfill my problem. This question also doesn't help although it's very similar: bind-the-deploy-and-publish-destination.
Is anyone else managing something like this? The other developers in my team are just modifying the published script to remove these objects but I HATE manual work, there HAS to be a solution! :)
Thanks all!
One of my schemas references a lot of sys.* objects which created a lot of errors in the build. I created another project in the solution and moved that schema to the new project.
Luckily you can build and publish at the project level.
This allows me to keep the other schema in change control at least.
(It may also help to set the Properties on the SQL files to Build Action: None)
Partial/Composite projects might be useful here. Main project contains all of your necessary DB objects for your apps to run. The partial project references the main project, but then contains all of the "Test" code.
Here are a couple of options from Jamie Thomson:
http://sqlblog.com/blogs/jamie_thomson/archive/2013/03/10/deployment-of-client-specific-database-code-using-ssdt.aspx --This may be the simplest way to handle this
http://sqlblog.com/blogs/jamie_thomson/archive/2012/01/01/implementing-sql-server-solutions-using-visual-studio-2010-database-projects-a-compendium-of-project-experiences.aspx --Lots of good information in this post and most of it also applies to SSDT SQL Projects.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd193415.aspx - Composite projects for larger DBs. This could potentially work for you as well.
We have multiple test projects that access databases directly. Those tests basically validate our sql queries written in C# code. Unfortunately, they are not separated at the moment and are in the same assemblies that also house true, non-dependent Unit tests (I think those database tests are considered Integration test, correct me if I'm wrong).
Currently, we use 2 testsettings files (sqlserver.testsettings and oracle.testsettings) to deploy a different 'ConnectionStrings.config' file before running the tests. Each of them have connection strings specific to their test databases, that should be created before any tests are run. We do this because we want to test these database methods with both SqlServer and Oracle databases, since some of our clients use SqlServer while others use Oracle.
With this in mind, we have an 'app.config' file on the test projects that contains something along these lines:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration>
<connectionStrings configSource="ConnectionStrings.config"/>
</configuration>
I would like to know if there would be another way to do this without using the testsettings file, which is in this case already deprecated in favor of the new format used by 'runsettings' files. I can't find the equivalent custom-file-deployment feature on runsettings specifications though, and considered creating multiple build configurations using XML transformations over the ConnectionStrings.config or app.config files.
The problem with XML transforms is that it is currently not supported for these types of projects, and I had a very hard time with SlowCheetah when going to the build server, and ultimately decided against using it (I had this same configSource scenario on one of our Web Application projects and tried transforming the external config file. I ended up merging the file with the web.config and using the standard msdeploy transformation).
What would you recommend in this case? This must also be runnable on our build server. At the moment, we can specify the same tests to be run with both testsettings files there.
Ideally we would also like that SqlServer tests be the standard for all developers, and Oracle tests would only be selected to run on our build server. This does not work right now, since every developer needs to specifically select the sqlserver.testsettings file prior to running the tests the first time. With the build configuration idea this could be achieved, so I'm leaning towards that at the moment, but I would like to hear a potentially better approach to the problem.
I have a feeling we are doing something very wrong in this whole process (and this includes the ideas presented in this post) and that there should be a much easier and straightforward way of doing it.