0:00 - Intro 1:05 - Getting started: demo application code and setup 10:20 - Problems with testing methods that manipulates with external stuff (database edits, e-mail senders etc) 12:39 - Mocking explained 15:44 - Writing tests with mocking 18:05 - Adding references for testing with MOCK 20:51 - Using statement 22:12 - AutoMock.GetLoose() vs AutoMock.GetStrict(); 23:30 - Using AutoMock: Writing the Unit Test with mocking 35:06 - Refactoring method that's under a UnitTest 36:03 - Checking data: comparing two objects 40:19 - Testing method that returns void 48:16 - Testing SQl call modification 52:47 - Recap 53:30 - Advice for beginners 55:15 - What not to test and why 58:24 - Summary 59:27 - Learning steps 1:01:42 - Concluding remarks
Have use Moq testing today, since we're starting to implement this framework within our product. Thanks to this video, it didn't take me long to create unit tests.
Hey Tim, Great video as usual. There's absolutely no reason you should be getting any thumbs down. There are those who know how to code really well but don't know how to teach, but you can do both hands down. Thank you for giving back to the community.
Kind of. The tutorial is very good... if you're using AutoFac, or some kind of Dependency Injection. I'm modding a game, and need to mock some of the supplied API for testing offline. I understand what mocking is, but I don't use AutoFac. The first 18 minutes of the video were explaining the project architecture, the basics of unit tests, and the difference between tests that don't need mocking, and those that do. We then install Moq, and AutoFac.Extras.Moq. We then move on to only show the AutoFac features of Moq... not an overview of how to use Moq in its own right. If you don't use Dependency Injection, or you are just starting on the road to learning how to use a Mocking framework, this video doesn't teach you as the title says it will. This was the reason for my Thumbs Down... I felt that the title and thumbnail were misleading, compared to the content, regardless of how well that content was presented. This missed the first ten rungs of the ladder. For an introduction to Moq, it would be better to use Moq in isolation, and then teach AutoFac.Extras.Moq as a follow-on video, clearly stating ("With AutoFac") within the title and/or thumbnail of the video. I've been trying to follow along, but I don't have an AutoMock class, and Mock isn't IDisposable, so I can't scope it within a using block.
Most of the videos are time tagged by volunteer students. Scroll down in the comments to see who did it and give them a shout out! They certainly deserve it (Hint: Ralfs)
Tim, I really admire you the way you explain the things. I remember ignoring this lesson in 2018, but today I came back to the very same tutorial. Happy to learn from you Tim Thanks
This is the kind of video that I'll never be able to finish watching. Kept falling asleep, then rewind back to watch again but fall asleep again. I've rewinded about four times this afternoon. 😂
when i first learnt abt tim i shared the same behavior you had. however, as time passes, i realize that i am using the wrong method. instead of watching the video, which is comprised of tons of new information, in a row, i should watch them bit by bit, namely 1. watch 5 more minutes 2. conclude what i have learnt 3. if i feel comfortable, go back to 1 4. otherwise, re-watch hope this helps
Again you are coming in clutch! Another great video! I still find it quite hard to know how to use mocking in my tests I am supposed to write, but this definetly gave me a better idea about what mocking is, and now I mind be able to read the other tests and actually understand what is going on! Thank you!
even thou I use Nunit for testing, but this video helped me quite a bit. Thanks a lot. Yours are good, cause you not only show HOW - but you tell WHY. Pretty rare on youtube I say. Thanks again!
@@IAmTimCorey I have a question regarding mocking here for the LoadData method. Is it true that it's better to use object parameters instead of dynamic parameters because it creates issues in mocking? for example to use ___ LoadData(string sqlStatement, object parameter, string connectionStringName, bool isStoredProcedure = false) ___ instead of ___ LoadData(string sqlStatement, U parameter, string connectionStringName, bool isStoredProcedure = false)
Thank you so much for this clear and concise explanation.. I tried learning mocking from a book a year back but never understood it that time.. i thought I should give it a try one more time.. Now I Finally know what mocking is .. Thanks again..
I've been searching for a while a good content for tests in Microsoft environment and now I found a good explanation. Finally I understand the reason and how to test void and CRUD methods.
Having watched your video on Unit tests yesterday; I started this video thinking how I missed the suspense of having to actually click run tests to get a green (or red) check mark. But man, the convenience enterprise provides is great! Will definitely have to look into those third party options for auto testing. Great video Tim, I know I'll be returning to watch again in the near future =]
Hello Tim. Another good video. After digging, I found that Moq appears to be the industry standard for mock-ing (based on the nuget download count). So, even though the video is nearly 2 years old, the framework is still good to get familiar with.
Tim, this was a good video. I was a bit hesitant about mock frameworks as I am a firm believer in writing all code when it comes to unit test. That's the way I was taught in the 90's. I watched your video several times and then it clicked it my thought process on how you used moq framework and more importantly why. I had to think back on how I wrote all the extra code to test to realize how this can cut down on writing so much of it before being able to find bugs. Thanks for a great video, I do appreciate this and look forward to watching more.
Im also loving the live code coverage feature. Good to know about that too! You have helped me really much again. Tomorrow i will watch your vid about Autofac
In my project I use Moq/Xunit and Dapper/DynamicParameters... If I don't use DynamicParameters my test works, but if I use DynamicParameters, my mock object just returns null??? If I just rund the code with DynamicParameters everything works fine and I get data back from my test DB Do you know a workaround to solve the problem with Dapper/DynamicParameters in unit testing?
This work for me. mockdb.Setup(x => x.DbQueryAsync( "USP_S_Test_Get", CommandType.StoredProcedure, It.IsAny())) .Returns(GetTestIEnum()); var cls = mock.Create(); var actual = cls.Get(testCode);
Is Moq a good choice for mocking integration tests? For example, if a method calls two methods: 1) read a mocked thermometer and returns the value and then 2) the value is checked against limits and returns a bool value.
It sounds like you are doing unit testing there, not integration testing. Integration testing is usually about testing the interaction of multiple things. You can still use moq for it if you want to put a boundary around the test, though.
First: Thankyou for all your videos! I love them!, I am learning a lot thanks to them. Second: Does the base code that you use in the video belong to any of your published courses?
for some reason I thought mock tests were something more closely resembling integrated tests but I was wrong I feel like this is not the best way to test things related to database, which just enforces you to check your input twice instead of actually checking the output for complex enough queries, it pains me to say but I guess I'll just have to stick to the real thing in docker with proper setup and teardown of tests
One thing I might ask you Tim, at 47.00 You're talking about how to test the VOID methods, but the explanation you gave was about just calling the void method 'certain number of times' not exactly the void function execution / catching at test-phase
In order to test more than just that the method fired, the method has to change something that you can test. Unit testing is about testing effects. So, you need to find an effect to evaluate.
Hey Tim!! any chance you can update this video to the latest version of Moq?, this one aged really bad, right now Moq is not required to use "using". Thanks!
When we passed in our known values, we knew what the resulting SQL string should look like. When it did not look the way we expected, we knew we had an issue. It compared the two strings to be sure they were the same. They weren't. Therefore, our expectations did not match our code's reality.
When you have a large number of classes that are injected in the class that you want to test. Is that a sign that it's a method that you shouldn't test because it might be too large? Or can I test them anyway. My question is really if you have like repo, Service and controller setup in your API should you test Services ? Service often has more business logic and do you test business logic with Unit test.
@@IAmTimCorey Thanks for the reply, it might be obvious to test everything but starting testing a large project without tests is a bit much to chew in.
Hi Tim! I have been a big fan for a long time. Always recomend your videos to my friends. A year ago I switched jobs and now I am working with Spring Boot instead of C#. And right now we are debating using H2 as a in memory database for testing. I would love to hear your thoughts about it. I always heard you should not use a database for testing, but at the same time is nice to know that our repositories are working and the db contrains are working as well. Thanks in advance!
Awesome video but I didn’t got a grasp of one important thing. Almost always I am using stored procedures for Dapper. Should I put sql syntax into my tests directly only for the sake of testing or Moq somehow is learning about stored procedures existing in the database? Don’t understand how to test repository in my application which contains tons of different stored procedures. Sorry if my question was a bit clunky and demonstrates my utter ignorance.
Personally, I don't unit test my stored procedures. They don't have logic in them almost ever beyond the filtering and sorting of data. That means I don't need to have SQL in my unit tests in C# because I'm not testing the results of the queries. Instead, I can mock the results so that I can test my actual C# code.
I am using the IDataAccess (DataLibrary) you made in another video, but I got a System.NullReferenceException on the actual list in the unit test. How does the unit test (especially the setup) look like if using the DataLibrary from your video "Connecting C# To MySQL Using Blazor"? I am not directly returning the output, but putting it in a global list and return it in a getter method.
Hi Tim, I am trying to combine the mocking with many other areas. But get a little stuck. In one of your other videos you have a line with something like: var x = await _sqlDataAccess.LoadData(usp, new { LanguageID = LanguageId }); This is kind of a combination of my classes with your logic. It looks like that dynamic is not supported by moq and xunit. With I replace it here with a single int it works. But that brings too much restrictions to use this line for other options. So, I thought to replace it with a List but then again it doesn't work. I am doing debug test and at the time it should give me back a result from the Mock it shows Null. Also I was thinking if I bring the parameter maybe as a tuple into the dataAccess class and convert it there to an List
I believe it should support dynamic but if it doesn't, you can always create your own mock manually of the sqlDataAccess class. Just create your own class that implements the interface and put your mocked code in the methods.
Hello Sir , thank you for all tutorials. Also , if you can make intermediate Web api project from scratch, it would be perfect for us. ( I finished your Web api tutorial and it was awesome. That's why I wanted one more full project :) ) Thank you again for your all videos Sir.
What do you do if your public method you're testing calls a private method that gets data from a db? How do you mock the private method so you can return fake data?
I don't mock private methods. I rework the dependencies. It sounds like you have a dependency (data access) that is not easily replaceable. That is something to work on fixing. Doing so will not only make your unit testing easier, it will also lead to a better design.
@@IAmTimCorey Hmm, so we have a Data Access Layer and inject the dataContext into the class. I really like your idea, but I'm not entirely certain of how I could go about refactoring this. We are using the repository pattern and have a controller calling a repo's public method (which is what I want to test). In that public method we have a private method that takes an id, joins 3 tables together, and returns some information. The public method then uses that information for more calculations. So what would that look like, or how would you go about implementing what you mentioned? Do you have a video that talks about this? We are using dotnet core 3.1 if that helps.
@@IAmTimCorey Ok, I will try to move that out. If I move that piece out of the repository method, but I still have a private method that does some calculations with that data, should I move that to the DAL folder as well or keep it private?
Hey, Tim. I'll be testing this in a personal project I have in development. But first I need to know something about the connection string best practices... In a scenario like the one you show, where would you put it? In the UI project or in the library itself? I understand you're using Sqlite so I guess it kind of maps itself (?). Never used it as I prefer to have an actual database, whenever possible. My point is... I created an appsettings.json on a consoleUI, where I'm testing the actual inserts to the database to check if they're working correctly. And in the library on getting the connection string. I know I should have both on one side only, but which side? It makes sense to me to have them in the library, but I think I've read somewhere we shouldn't do that, for some reason... I need to know, from your experience, what's your take on this?
We store the connection strings in the appsettings.json file (or app.config/web.config if you are on .NET Framework). Those files are associated with front-end project types (Console, WinForm, WPF, ASP.NET Core, etc.) We put the connection string in the front-end because then the front-end dictates the database that the library will use. This is useful because we can reuse the library in multiple projects with different database locations (even if it is the same database structure it will live in different locations).
@@IAmTimCorey that was my thought. But then there's the case that someone that will implement another UI forgets about connection string setup for some reason or names it differently. Anything we can do about that aside from just letting it throw an exception? Or is it better to just let it blow up?
How can we mock Httpcontext of a mvc controller. I am trying to test a action method where i am getting session variable null all the time while unit testing.
Uuuh, dumb question: how have you written those test classes? Also 13:55 what if you want to actually test the DB interractions? :P 34:44 I don't get it, we are mocking the data returrn by the sql method, why changing the sql string parameter fails the test? Seems like a neat framework though. :P
OK, I'm going to answer your questions in the order you asked: 1. I wrote those test classes by hand. No special tool needed. 2. If you want to test DB interactions, that is no longer a unit test. That is an integration test and it is a more complex animal. 3. Changing the SQL string means that the call was no longer made that we expected to be made. If you expect someone to call an "Add" method and pass in a 1 and a 3 as parameters, that isn't the same call as passing in a 2 and a 4. The same is true for this. If the SQL string isn't the same, it won't return the same results that we expect.
Hi, Tim. After all i just have one question. would it be a good idea to extract ConvertHeightTextToInches and ValidateName methods into different classes, so that PersonProcessor could adhere SRP? i.e. the rules being used to convert HeightText to Inches could change and we don't want to change PersonProcessor because of that.
thanks for theexcellent video. Can you please tell me how to test a data layer function which calls stored procedure? Your eg shows simple queries but how do i test a function which calls SP
@@IAmTimCorey cool..but am little confused because how do i mock command object. Eg IDbCommand command = GetCommand(con)) {command.comandText="someSPName"}.
Thank you for the amazing content, Tim. I have been following you for quite some time and I always learn a few things from your videos even when they cover topics that I am already familiar with. Just wondering what your thoughts are on Test Driven Development. Is it something that you practice in the projects that you work on? I am looking to learn more about it. I would be most grateful if you can cover it in a video sometime. Thanks again. :)
53:43 Thank you. Shelf it is. Somewhere in the SOLID series I kinda started to lose a grip on my understanding of things. Interfaces and abstraction was ok, but autofac threw me off. For beginner, this feels, like it should be on some sort of "Master level" not "Advanced topics" playlist... Then again, it's most likely just because of lack for trying things out :)
Hi Tim, If you are bypassing the code of SQLLiteDataAccess class than why do we need the moq library for mocking. We can simply have two classes implementing ISQLDataAccess where one would return the actual data from DB and the other mock class will return the mock data. So we can create our app context at the starting of our app where all the interfaces would have the actual data access classes and from the testing project the context interfaces will have the mock classes Here using moq requires lot of code to be written as well as adding a library in your project Correct me if I'm wrong
What you are proposing is to write a class to mock the implementation. That is what Moq does for you in a more dynamic manner. It allows you to make a simple mock (you don't have to mock everything, just what you are using) and it allows you to change the output values to test various scenarios (something your actual implementation would have a harder time doing).
@@IAmTimCorey Hi Tim, We can also achieve testing different scenarios using mock classes and return the output on the basis of some reference IDs. By using mock classes all the mock return code would be in mock classes and our unit test functions would have just assertion code. In moq we need to write objects of moq classes than use create setup functions All these code isn't required. I have implemented the mock classes in my company although I can't share the code but I will write some short demo code and will present that to you in sometime.
With moq you can configure it to return different data for different scenarios. Therefore there is greater flexibility than if you hardcoded a result into a class and you won’t end up with loads of classes you have created to use in a single test. Having said that I do use a fake class in many cases when I just need an instance and I am not testing it.
Using this getloose, to test a method that is returning a connection string, that is located in a library is a good way? Or should i do it in another way, because i cant figure it out. PS: this method used dependency from IConfiguration
Hi Tim, This line seems to be failing. mock.Create(); I have photoservice class that implements dependency injection which its constrcutor seems bit like this private readonly PhotoEntities _context; public PhotoService(PhotoEntities context) { _context = context; } Any idea how I should get around? thanks.
Is there a way to mock a database and send stuff to it? For my school project I have to make a web application where 90% of everything is either sending things to or receiving things from an SQL database. Most of my methods and classes revolve around doing something with the database however knowing if the code ran isn't enough to say if the test was successful. The code might have ran but the user it added misses half of the info he should have gotten. So I wanted to ask if there is a way to mock a database, send something to it and then checking if what was send was correct?
How you do that is to separate your writing to the database from your business logic code. I do that in the TimCo Retail Manager series. There is a class that has a Read and a Write method for SQL. Then I have other classes for figuring out what to read and write. I can test those and mock the data access methods (read/write) easily.
Hey Tim, great content as always. I was hoping to find a full unit test course on your site! I'd be a day-1 customer if you manage to put one together. In any case, I was hoping you might be able to help with some simple guidance if you don't mind. I understand mocking within the context of unit tests, but I'm wanting to mock service calls for my ViewModels that ultimately the UI binds to. Basically, I have a ViewModel that makes a service call, which hits a database and (for example) returns a list of people, in my view I have a DataGrid that binds to the results in the ViewModel. No problem. What I want to do is instead of hitting the actual database I'd like to return mocked objects. I have cobbled something together manually that handles this, but can you shine some light on best practices with this type of scenario? Basically what I'm doing now is I have a dummy service (both the dummy and actual service implement the same interface) and the dummy service (manually) mocks up service calls and results. I'm using dependency injection to determine which service I'm actually going to use. Does this sound like a decent approach? Any guidance is greatly appreciated!
thanks for the great video, as always what do you do if you want to test a class that doesn't implement an API? do you have to "force" it into implementing one?
Hey Tim, love your videos.. I like how you explain things. One question, my project test doesn't run at all. It does spin but at the end it just says something like "0 tests ran, 0 tests failed, 0 tests skipped." Also, the test says "Excluded from Live Unit Tests" and I'm right-clicking and choosing "Include...." doesn't seem to have an effect. Thanks!
I'll give you my opinion (there are some differing ones). I personally do as many asserts as needed to verify a test case. If a method changes three values in an object, I will usually test all three. Some people think that this should be three tests. I disagree because it is one action. So, I do as many asserts as necessary to verify that the state that has changed is as I expected.
Hi Tim, I have a question if you got time for it: I am trying to mock a SshClient part of Ssh.Net library which I don't have control over. The part giving me problems is that this SshClient does not implement any interface so I will have direct dependency on it. What is the best way to handle this issue?
You have a couple options. The best option is if you can isolate the calls to that library in a wrapper class that you can control (and create an interface for). You don't need to unit test the SshClient itself, just the code that uses it so you can mock it where it is relied on. The other option is to use a Fake to replace it (not nearly as clean).
Hi Tim, Thanks a lot for such a wonderful video. I appreciate your advices and sharing with us how you work (for example how far do you go with test coverage). Is there any tool/platform that you would recommend for analysing test coverage, code smells, etc (i.e. sonarqube)?
Just a question, how do you handle Winform objects with autofac. I have manager/processor classes registered in autofac that will have to update winform ui but since i created the ui elements using winform designer, they are not registered with autofac. And I hesitate to touch any code made by the designer. One way is to pass the winform ui as arguments everytime i use a method but that feels tedious especially if the processor class is design specifically to update a certain winform ui element.
Every object that you instantiate, including Winforms windows, needs to be registered in Autofac. If you do manual instantiation, you negate the purpose of dependency injection. You won't need to touch designer code, though.
@@IAmTimCorey Lets say I have two projects FormsUI and FormsLibrary where FormsUI depends on FormsLibrary. I have a listboxmanager class in formslibrary that requires a listbox reference from FormsUI. How do I tell autofac to pass the reference of the listbox object created in FormsUI designer to the listboxmanager.
I have been learning so many things from you through years and used them in my projects. I appreciate your hard work. You have a great way of explaining everything; however, just as my personal opinion, you repeat the same thing in many ways that may waste time. I am waiting to see how you mock the database for a while and you are explaining how mock is spelled, repeating why _database is needed a few times, etc.
I'm going to do a video on it, hopefully tomorrow. The bottom line is this: the implementation wasn't great, but the people complaining are WAY more in the wrong than the creator. He asked for help, got nothing, and so he tried to get help on his own. He didn't think through all of the implications, so it wasn't the perfect solution. However, he listened and removed the problematic code immediately. Open source for free is not sustainable. We need better solutions to make sure these creators are compensated so that they can maintain the things that the whole world relies on.
Great video Tim thanks. Never really done any unit testing as the firms I've work at don't seem to do them, so never really got into them. AutoFac... Looks like I missed a video - DI With AutoFac - YT seems to think I've watched it. I'll have to go and watch that now as I had no idea what AutoFac is.
@IAmTimCorey -- I have a Generic-based data handler interface and associated services which I am trying to mock calls for. However, anytime I run a test, I get a NULL value from any calls to the Generic data handler. If I run the code in Production, the calls work, so I do not believe it is an issue with the way I have my services written. Any ideas what causes this kind of issue with Moq? NOTE => I am using the following NuGet Packages, in case they are the issue: AutoFac / AutoFac.Extras.Moq = 4.1.0 / 4.2.0 XUnit 2.4.1 Moq 4.13.1 My thought is it might be an issue with AutoFac and Moq, as I already had to go back multiple versions to get Moq/AutoFac to even play well together, as it was previously failing on `var mock = AutoMock.GetLoose()` This seems simliar to what another user below in the comments is seeing, where your code's `cls.LoadPeople()` call is returning null for them, but not others. Thanks for the videos, they are most helpful when trying to learn new concepts (I am an older programmer, and mocking is not something we did in most other jobs I have held).
I wanted to ask how to go about applying testing to following scenario in following .NET Core App: Class A is a Background service that consumes a message from a Rabbit queue. Class B is a "MessageProcessor" class. It has a public method. This method makes a call to a private method that invokes a public method of Class C. So Class B has a dependency on Class C. Class C is a class that makes REST API call to an external API. Do I have to put all 3 classes under separate tests or does it depend on what to test/what I should be testing? So if I wanted to test the behaviour of processing a message I would put Class B under test and mock it's dependencies appropriately. My current understanding is that I should be testing specific behaviour. Is that right?
11:51 - "You have to have the same schema for production & testing databases" & "You always need to clean up your testing database" - well yeah, that's how I program on Ruby on Rails. Takes just installing one plugin. Mocking your database is the worst thing you can do in Testing. Mocking is used to mock things that change from run to run (e.g. requests to a remote server, Time.Now() request, probably some other things). 13:17 - There's nothing wrong with having a hundred dependencies if they all make you able to deploy your features faster and with higher quality. Why reinvent the wheel if someone made a plugin? Maintenance of incompatibility between plugins is not as bad as reinventing say a State Machine library in every project.
I can see how having hundreds of dependencies could be considered fine, but you really want a bit more simplicity per class. This comes back to the Single Responsibility Principle. If you have hundreds of dependencies (I know you were exaggerating, I'm just using that same language) then your class/method is probably doing too much. For example, if a method has a dependency on HTTPClient and IDataAccess, that's probably too much. Talking to the web and talking to the database is probably a violation of SRP. Add in an IEmailClient and a ISmsClient and now you are doing way too much in one method. At that point, you aren't doing unit testing, you are doing integration testing.
I love the stuff with Moq, but due to the fact that extension methods are not supported, when you want to mock the ILogger it becomes a real mess (LogDebug, LogInformation are extension methods) :( You can only use the plain Log method, which is quite impractical. What is your opinion on this?
This was of great help for my project, Thanks Corey! By the way, how would you setup your LoadPeople call if you are using LoadData multiple times with different querystrings within LoadPeople (let's assume thats a valid use case)
I have a project in C# where I try to use Dapper, MVVMCross, Moq and Xunit... Everything works, but when I try to run my Unit test with Mock objects it dosn't work! the mock object is just null... I do it just like you do in your video... If I make a very simple example, where I Mock a DBConnection with no sql or DynamicParameters, it works fine... What am I missing? is it something with Dapper or MVVMCross you can't do/Is not supported.... If I just call my code normal, without unit test, it works fine
@@IAmTimCorey here is my test [Fact] public void PeopleGetByLastName_ShouldReturnOnePersonUsingMoq() { using (AutoMock mock = AutoMock.GetLoose()) { DynamicParameters p = new DynamicParameters(); p.Add("@LastName", "Kjeldsen"); string sql = "select * from dbo.Person where LastName = @LastName"; mock.Mock() .Setup(x => x.GetPersonsByLastName(sql, p)) .Returns(GetOneResult()); PeopleAccessHandler cls = mock.Create(); List actual = cls.PeopleGetByLastName("Kjeldsen"); //This just returns null List expected = GetOneResult(); Assert.True(actual != null); Assert.Equal(expected[0].FirstName, actual[0].FirstName); } }
If I don't use DynamicParameters my test works, but if I use DynamicParameters, my mock object just returns null??? If I just rund the code with DynamicParameters everything works fine and I get data back from my test DB What am I missing?
The problem with the Mocking in this tutorial is to rewrite the code in the test. Because let's say my class has only a public method named "input" to receive the data inserted by the user. That method checks the user data by calling a private method "checkData" and only if the data is validated it calls the private "save" method. I don't want to expose the private methods as public. How to mock the "save" private method?
You don't need to. Remember, unit tests are about testing inputs and outputs. That is what you would be testing. Since your save does some type of modification (probably sending data to the database), you could mock your database connection and make sure it was called if the data was valid. If it was not valid data, you could check to be sure the database was not called. You aren't testing the methods, you are testing how they affect things.
Hi Tim, love your videos. I am a junior - mid level software engineer trying to bring some implementation tests to my company. We use entity framework with a database for each of our clients where each DB has the same table structure (same tables and columns within those tables across all dbs). Do you have any suggestions on what framework/Design pattern to use to achieve this?
Sorry, I'm not sure I understand. Are you saying you want to do implementation testing on your clients' installations? If so, that sounds like something you want to build custom since it is post-deployment.
qq- in our case .net core code is let say "x" name it is loaded 25 input file loading into the DB. in this case how right test casework into a database like a real-world scenario? pls can u give some good hint or link?
If I understand your question, you are asking how to test things like inserting items into the database. In general, we do this very rarely. This lands in at least integration testing if not end-to-end testing. The reason for this is because we are testing how the parts fit together. You will find value here, but it is a much harder thing to test and much less valuable compared to testing the logic inside your application. Make sure that you are processing the data up to the database properly. Then, the likelihood of finding an insertion issue is much lower. End-to-end still adds value here, but it is sometimes more valuable to just have people do that testing manually.
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0:00 - Intro
1:05 - Getting started: demo application code and setup
10:20 - Problems with testing methods that manipulates with external stuff (database edits, e-mail senders etc)
12:39 - Mocking explained
15:44 - Writing tests with mocking
18:05 - Adding references for testing with MOCK
20:51 - Using statement
22:12 - AutoMock.GetLoose() vs AutoMock.GetStrict();
23:30 - Using AutoMock: Writing the Unit Test with mocking
35:06 - Refactoring method that's under a UnitTest
36:03 - Checking data: comparing two objects
40:19 - Testing method that returns void
48:16 - Testing SQl call modification
52:47 - Recap
53:30 - Advice for beginners
55:15 - What not to test and why
58:24 - Summary
59:27 - Learning steps
1:01:42 - Concluding remarks
Thank you! I have added it to the video.
Have use Moq testing today, since we're starting to implement this framework within our product. Thanks to this video, it didn't take me long to create unit tests.
Excellent! I am glad it was helpful.
Thanks for making a complicated subject easy to understand. You have a real talent for teaching!
Thank you.
Hey Tim,
Great video as usual. There's absolutely no reason you should be getting any thumbs down. There are those who know how to code really well but don't know how to teach, but you can do both hands down.
Thank you for giving back to the community.
I appreciate the kind words.
Kind of. The tutorial is very good... if you're using AutoFac, or some kind of Dependency Injection.
I'm modding a game, and need to mock some of the supplied API for testing offline. I understand what mocking is, but I don't use AutoFac. The first 18 minutes of the video were explaining the project architecture, the basics of unit tests, and the difference between tests that don't need mocking, and those that do. We then install Moq, and AutoFac.Extras.Moq. We then move on to only show the AutoFac features of Moq... not an overview of how to use Moq in its own right.
If you don't use Dependency Injection, or you are just starting on the road to learning how to use a Mocking framework, this video doesn't teach you as the title says it will. This was the reason for my Thumbs Down... I felt that the title and thumbnail were misleading, compared to the content, regardless of how well that content was presented. This missed the first ten rungs of the ladder. For an introduction to Moq, it would be better to use Moq in isolation, and then teach AutoFac.Extras.Moq as a follow-on video, clearly stating ("With AutoFac") within the title and/or thumbnail of the video.
I've been trying to follow along, but I don't have an AutoMock class, and Mock isn't IDisposable, so I can't scope it within a using block.
I really like how your videos are segmented so that I can jump to a particular area by hovering over the progress bar.
Most of the videos are time tagged by volunteer students. Scroll down in the comments to see who did it and give them a shout out! They certainly deserve it (Hint: Ralfs)
Tim, I really admire you the way you explain the things. I remember ignoring this lesson in 2018, but today I came back to the very same tutorial. Happy to learn from you Tim Thanks
You are very welcome! I like to hear about students being able to search the channel and find just what they need when they need it.
It had been a while since I finished watching a video with the excitement of having just learned something new and empowering. Thank you.
You are welcome.
Damn you Tim You videos are amazing and so addictive , it's 4 AM here and i have work tomorrow. Thanks a lot for sharing you knowledge.
I'm glad you are enjoying them. Hopefully, you don't curse my name when you are at work.
This is the kind of video that I'll never be able to finish watching. Kept falling asleep, then rewind back to watch again but fall asleep again. I've rewinded about four times this afternoon. 😂
Watch it at night so you at least get a good night’s sleep out of it.
@@IAmTimCorey 😄😄😄😄
when i first learnt abt tim i shared the same behavior you had. however, as time passes, i realize that i am using the wrong method. instead of watching the video, which is comprised of tons of new information, in a row, i should watch them bit by bit, namely
1. watch 5 more minutes
2. conclude what i have learnt
3. if i feel comfortable, go back to 1
4. otherwise, re-watch
hope this helps
That means you do not give up easily- that’s good
Story of my life. I go to a beach 🏝️ or mountain 🏔️ shopping center it’s not easy but his vids are the best
Again you are coming in clutch! Another great video! I still find it quite hard to know how to use mocking in my tests I am supposed to write, but this definetly gave me a better idea about what mocking is, and now I mind be able to read the other tests and actually understand what is going on! Thank you!
Happy to help!
even thou I use Nunit for testing, but this video helped me quite a bit. Thanks a lot. Yours are good, cause you not only show HOW - but you tell WHY. Pretty rare on youtube I say. Thanks again!
You are welcome.
I've watched 2 or 3 other training videos on this topic, and yours clears it up for me. Thanks!
I am glad it was helpful.
Thank you so much for all your videos I can't stress enough the amount of gratitude I, and I'm sure the rest of us, have for you, so truly thank you.
You are welcome.
@@IAmTimCorey I have a question regarding mocking here for the LoadData method.
Is it true that it's better to use object parameters instead of dynamic parameters because it creates issues in mocking?
for example to use
___
LoadData(string sqlStatement, object parameter, string connectionStringName, bool isStoredProcedure = false)
___
instead of
___
LoadData(string sqlStatement, U parameter, string connectionStringName, bool isStoredProcedure = false)
Thank you so much for this clear and concise explanation..
I tried learning mocking from a book a year back but never understood it that time.. i thought I should give it a try one more time..
Now I Finally know what mocking is ..
Thanks again..
Happy to help
Beautifully explained with calm voice. So good!
Thanks for trusting Tim for your learning
I've been searching for a while a good content for tests in Microsoft environment and now I found a good explanation. Finally I understand the reason and how to test void and CRUD methods.
Excellent!
Thanks for showing me a whole new world, shining, shimmering, splendid...
You are welcome.
Thank you!!! Great tutorial on Mocking!!! Got the first of many written. Awesome!!!
You are welcome.
You the man TIm! My go 2 for C# learning. Cheers
Thank you!
I'm always thankful for your efforts.
You are welcome.
Having watched your video on Unit tests yesterday; I started this video thinking how I missed the suspense of having to actually click run tests to get a green (or red) check mark. But man, the convenience enterprise provides is great! Will definitely have to look into those third party options for auto testing.
Great video Tim, I know I'll be returning to watch again in the near future =]
Excellent!
Thanks, Tim!
Always good value content!
You are welcome.
Hello Tim. Another good video. After digging, I found that Moq appears to be the industry standard for mock-ing (based on the nuget download count). So, even though the video is nearly 2 years old, the framework is still good to get familiar with.
Yep, it is a pretty popular framework.
Tim, this was a good video. I was a bit hesitant about mock frameworks as I am a firm believer in writing all code when it comes to unit test. That's the way I was taught in the 90's. I watched your video several times and then it clicked it my thought process on how you used moq framework and more importantly why. I had to think back on how I wrote all the extra code to test to realize how this can cut down on writing so much of it before being able to find bugs. Thanks for a great video, I do appreciate this and look forward to watching more.
Awesome! I'm glad the video was able to help clarify somethings for you and improve your process.
Thank you for showing the code behind the class SqlLiteDataAccess at 55:30. Wow, Dapper is awesome! Great Video!
I definitely agree that Dapper is awesome. I'm glad you enjoyed the video.
Dapper supports async fully so I would recommend making your class async as well.
Im also loving the live code coverage feature. Good to know about that too! You have helped me really much again. Tomorrow i will watch your vid about Autofac
Great!
Thanks Tim! .. from Neuquén Argentina. It is a very good and illustrative video.
You are welcome.
Awesome tutorial !! Thank you once again for sharing this Tim.
You are most welcome. Thanks for watching.
In my project I use Moq/Xunit and Dapper/DynamicParameters...
If I don't use DynamicParameters my test works, but if I use DynamicParameters, my mock object just returns null???
If I just rund the code with DynamicParameters everything works fine and I get data back from my test DB
Do you know a workaround to solve the problem with Dapper/DynamicParameters in unit testing?
This work for me.
mockdb.Setup(x => x.DbQueryAsync(
"USP_S_Test_Get",
CommandType.StoredProcedure,
It.IsAny()))
.Returns(GetTestIEnum());
var cls = mock.Create();
var actual = cls.Get(testCode);
Great video. Very addictive channel.
Thank you!
qq for initial set up for mocking & xunit i have got the error " response status code does not indicate success: 403(Forbidden).
That's a permission issue (a 403 error).
Thanks man! Yet another great tutorial. I get more and more Inout for my new project!
Cool!
Is Moq a good choice for mocking integration tests? For example, if a method calls two methods: 1) read a mocked thermometer and returns the value and then 2) the value is checked against limits and returns a bool value.
It sounds like you are doing unit testing there, not integration testing. Integration testing is usually about testing the interaction of multiple things. You can still use moq for it if you want to put a boundary around the test, though.
This is fantastic. Extremely relevant to what I am currently working on. Thank you!
I'm glad it is so relevant to you. Thanks for letting me know.
I really like your advice, and autofac is so nice. Not have to click run every time you update your code is so convenient. Thank you for the content.
You are welcome.
Tim, thanks for the effort. Well done.
Thank you!
I really needed to refresh this today. Thanks you. and keep it up!
Good Explaining!
Excellent! Glad I could help.
Really good video. Thanks for making it easy, Tim!
You are welcome.
First: Thankyou for all your videos! I love them!, I am learning a lot thanks to them.
Second: Does the base code that you use in the video belong to any of your published courses?
No, it does not.
for some reason I thought mock tests were something more closely resembling integrated tests but I was wrong
I feel like this is not the best way to test things related to database, which just enforces you to check your input twice instead of actually checking the output
for complex enough queries, it pains me to say but I guess I'll just have to stick to the real thing in docker with proper setup and teardown of tests
Thanks for watching
Great video Tim
Thanks!
One thing I might ask you Tim, at 47.00 You're talking about how to test the VOID methods, but the explanation you gave was about just calling the void method 'certain number of times' not exactly the void function execution / catching at test-phase
In order to test more than just that the method fired, the method has to change something that you can test. Unit testing is about testing effects. So, you need to find an effect to evaluate.
Very informative! Thank you for all the effort, I'm sure, went into making this video!
You are welcome.
Thank you Tim you are helping me a lot.
You are very welcome
great video, thanks a lot Tim
Glad you enjoyed it
Always top notch.
Thanks
Hey Tim!! any chance you can update this video to the latest version of Moq?, this one aged really bad, right now Moq is not required to use "using". Thanks!
Thanks for the suggestion. Please add it to the list on the suggestion site so others can vote on it as well: suggestions.iamtimcorey.com/
@@IAmTimCorey Done!
I loved this video! Thanks again Tim
You are welcome.
Hi Tim, how the test at minute 51 realize, that the sql is wrong with the integer value?
When we passed in our known values, we knew what the resulting SQL string should look like. When it did not look the way we expected, we knew we had an issue. It compared the two strings to be sure they were the same. They weren't. Therefore, our expectations did not match our code's reality.
You saved my life once again :)
Good to know.
When you have a large number of classes that are injected in the class that you want to test. Is that a sign that it's a method that you shouldn't test because it might be too large?
Or can I test them anyway. My question is really if you have like repo, Service and controller setup in your API should you test Services ? Service often has more business logic and do you test business logic with Unit test.
Does it do work? Then it should be tested, regardless of how many dependencies it has. And yes, you test business logic with unit tests.
@@IAmTimCorey Thanks for the reply, it might be obvious to test everything but starting testing a large project without tests is a bit much to chew in.
Hi Tim! I have been a big fan for a long time. Always recomend your videos to my friends.
A year ago I switched jobs and now I am working with Spring Boot instead of C#. And right now we are debating using H2 as a in memory database for testing.
I would love to hear your thoughts about it. I always heard you should not use a database for testing, but at the same time is nice to know that our repositories are working and the db contrains are working as well.
Thanks in advance!
Awesome video but I didn’t got a grasp of one important thing. Almost always I am using stored procedures for Dapper. Should I put sql syntax into my tests directly only for the sake of testing or Moq somehow is learning about stored procedures existing in the database? Don’t understand how to test repository in my application which contains tons of different stored procedures. Sorry if my question was a bit clunky and demonstrates my utter ignorance.
Personally, I don't unit test my stored procedures. They don't have logic in them almost ever beyond the filtering and sorting of data. That means I don't need to have SQL in my unit tests in C# because I'm not testing the results of the queries. Instead, I can mock the results so that I can test my actual C# code.
I am using the IDataAccess (DataLibrary) you made in another video, but I got a System.NullReferenceException on the actual list in the unit test.
How does the unit test (especially the setup) look like if using the DataLibrary from your video "Connecting C# To MySQL Using Blazor"?
I am not directly returning the output, but putting it in a global list and return it in a getter method.
Thanks sir for this great video.
You are welcome.
If you are using SQL Server not Sqlite (ISqliteDataAccess) what Interface file do you use and where can I get it? Thanks in advance.
Hi Tim, I am trying to combine the mocking with many other areas. But get a little stuck. In one of your other videos you have a line with something like:
var x = await _sqlDataAccess.LoadData(usp, new { LanguageID = LanguageId });
This is kind of a combination of my classes with your logic. It looks like that dynamic is not supported by moq and xunit. With I replace it here with a single int it works. But that brings too much restrictions to use this line for other options. So, I thought to replace it with a List but then again it doesn't work.
I am doing debug test and at the time it should give me back a result from the Mock it shows Null.
Also I was thinking if I bring the parameter maybe as a tuple into the dataAccess class and convert it there to an List
The project that I am working on are in .Core 3.1 and the test project is .Net standard 2.0
I believe it should support dynamic but if it doesn't, you can always create your own mock manually of the sqlDataAccess class. Just create your own class that implements the interface and put your mocked code in the methods.
@@IAmTimCorey thanks, will have a look at it. Just doing some other things at the moment. You will see another reply in another video for that.
Hello Sir , thank you for all tutorials. Also , if you can make intermediate Web api project from scratch, it would be perfect for us. ( I finished your Web api tutorial and it was awesome. That's why I wanted one more full project :) )
Thank you again for your all videos Sir.
It is on the agenda. Thanks for the suggestion.
Thanks tim for more new stuff
You are welcome.
What do you do if your public method you're testing calls a private method that gets data from a db? How do you mock the private method so you can return fake data?
I don't mock private methods. I rework the dependencies. It sounds like you have a dependency (data access) that is not easily replaceable. That is something to work on fixing. Doing so will not only make your unit testing easier, it will also lead to a better design.
@@IAmTimCorey Hmm, so we have a Data Access Layer and inject the dataContext into the class. I really like your idea, but I'm not entirely certain of how I could go about refactoring this. We are using the repository pattern and have a controller calling a repo's public method (which is what I want to test). In that public method we have a private method that takes an id, joins 3 tables together, and returns some information. The public method then uses that information for more calculations. So what would that look like, or how would you go about implementing what you mentioned?
Do you have a video that talks about this? We are using dotnet core 3.1 if that helps.
@@IAmTimCorey Ok, I will try to move that out. If I move that piece out of the repository method, but I still have a private method that does some calculations with that data, should I move that to the DAL folder as well or keep it private?
Hey, Tim.
I'll be testing this in a personal project I have in development.
But first I need to know something about the connection string best practices...
In a scenario like the one you show, where would you put it? In the UI project or in the library itself?
I understand you're using Sqlite so I guess it kind of maps itself (?). Never used it as I prefer to have an actual database, whenever possible.
My point is... I created an appsettings.json on a consoleUI, where I'm testing the actual inserts to the database to check if they're working correctly.
And in the library on getting the connection string. I know I should have both on one side only, but which side?
It makes sense to me to have them in the library, but I think I've read somewhere we shouldn't do that, for some reason...
I need to know, from your experience, what's your take on this?
We store the connection strings in the appsettings.json file (or app.config/web.config if you are on .NET Framework). Those files are associated with front-end project types (Console, WinForm, WPF, ASP.NET Core, etc.) We put the connection string in the front-end because then the front-end dictates the database that the library will use. This is useful because we can reuse the library in multiple projects with different database locations (even if it is the same database structure it will live in different locations).
@@IAmTimCorey that was my thought.
But then there's the case that someone that will implement another UI forgets about connection string setup for some reason or names it differently.
Anything we can do about that aside from just letting it throw an exception? Or is it better to just let it blow up?
How can we mock Httpcontext of a mvc controller. I am trying to test a action method where i am getting session variable null all the time while unit testing.
Uuuh, dumb question: how have you written those test classes?
Also 13:55 what if you want to actually test the DB interractions? :P
34:44 I don't get it, we are mocking the data returrn by the sql method, why changing the sql string parameter fails the test?
Seems like a neat framework though. :P
OK, I'm going to answer your questions in the order you asked:
1. I wrote those test classes by hand. No special tool needed.
2. If you want to test DB interactions, that is no longer a unit test. That is an integration test and it is a more complex animal.
3. Changing the SQL string means that the call was no longer made that we expected to be made. If you expect someone to call an "Add" method and pass in a 1 and a 3 as parameters, that isn't the same call as passing in a 2 and a 4. The same is true for this. If the SQL string isn't the same, it won't return the same results that we expect.
1 and 2, ok!
Still not sure about how this system interact related to 3 but that's more like about the tool used.
Thanks for your time.
Hi, Tim. After all i just have one question. would it be a good idea to extract ConvertHeightTextToInches and ValidateName methods into different classes, so that PersonProcessor could adhere SRP? i.e. the rules being used to convert HeightText to Inches could change and we don't want to change PersonProcessor because of that.
Those would be things to consider. It depends on your application size and what you are attempting to do, but probably yes.
thanks for theexcellent video. Can you please tell me how to test a data layer function which calls stored procedure? Your eg shows simple queries but how do i test a function which calls SP
Check to make sure it makes the call (mock the actual item it is calling) and make sure the inputs are correct for what you expected.
@@IAmTimCorey cool..but am little confused because how do i mock command object. Eg IDbCommand command = GetCommand(con)) {command.comandText="someSPName"}.
what is confusing me is how do i mock the spname..like syntax etc...can u please provide an eg if possible
Thank you for the amazing content, Tim. I have been following you for quite some time and I always learn a few things from your videos even when they cover topics that I am already familiar with. Just wondering what your thoughts are on Test Driven Development. Is it something that you practice in the projects that you work on? I am looking to learn more about it. I would be most grateful if you can cover it in a video sometime. Thanks again. :)
Thanks for the suggestion. Please add it to the list on the suggestion site so others can vote on it as well: suggestions.iamtimcorey.com/
53:43
Thank you. Shelf it is. Somewhere in the SOLID series I kinda started to lose a grip on my understanding of things.
Interfaces and abstraction was ok, but autofac threw me off.
For beginner, this feels, like it should be on some sort of "Master level" not "Advanced topics" playlist... Then again, it's most likely just because of lack for trying things out :)
Yep, it takes a bit of work to get to this point for sure.
Thanks for adding times to the descriptions... I am sure you will understand how autofac in a few days, didnt take me too long
@@bigdummyhead2162 Thanks for the support! :)
Hi Tim,
If you are bypassing the code of SQLLiteDataAccess class than why do we need the moq library for mocking.
We can simply have two classes implementing ISQLDataAccess where one would return the actual data from DB and the other mock class will return the mock data.
So we can create our app context at the starting of our app where all the interfaces would have the actual data access classes and from the testing project the context interfaces will have the mock classes
Here using moq requires lot of code to be written as well as adding a library in your project
Correct me if I'm wrong
What you are proposing is to write a class to mock the implementation. That is what Moq does for you in a more dynamic manner. It allows you to make a simple mock (you don't have to mock everything, just what you are using) and it allows you to change the output values to test various scenarios (something your actual implementation would have a harder time doing).
@@IAmTimCorey Hi Tim,
We can also achieve testing different scenarios using mock classes and return the output on the basis of some reference IDs.
By using mock classes all the mock return code would be in mock classes and our unit test functions would have just assertion code.
In moq we need to write objects of moq classes than use create setup functions
All these code isn't required.
I have implemented the mock classes in my company although I can't share the code but I will write some short demo code and will present that to you in sometime.
With moq you can configure it to return different data for different scenarios. Therefore there is greater flexibility than if you hardcoded a result into a class and you won’t end up with loads of classes you have created to use in a single test. Having said that I do use a fake class in many cases when I just need an instance and I am not testing it.
Using this getloose, to test a method that is returning a connection string, that is located in a library is a good way? Or should i do it in another way, because i cant figure it out.
PS: this method used dependency from IConfiguration
Thanks for the video. What are my options for Live Testing if I only have Visual Studio Community 2022? This live testing tool is very handy
Hi Tim,
This line seems to be failing. mock.Create(); I have photoservice class that implements dependency injection which its constrcutor seems bit like this
private readonly PhotoEntities _context;
public PhotoService(PhotoEntities context)
{
_context = context;
}
Any idea how I should get around? thanks.
You would need to pass the instance in to the constructor so it would look something like mock.Create(yourPhotoEntries instance);
Is there a way to mock a database and send stuff to it? For my school project I have to make a web application where 90% of everything is either sending things to or receiving things from an SQL database. Most of my methods and classes revolve around doing something with the database however knowing if the code ran isn't enough to say if the test was successful. The code might have ran but the user it added misses half of the info he should have gotten. So I wanted to ask if there is a way to mock a database, send something to it and then checking if what was send was correct?
How you do that is to separate your writing to the database from your business logic code. I do that in the TimCo Retail Manager series. There is a class that has a Read and a Write method for SQL. Then I have other classes for figuring out what to read and write. I can test those and mock the data access methods (read/write) easily.
Hey Tim, great content as always. I was hoping to find a full unit test course on your site! I'd be a day-1 customer if you manage to put one together.
In any case, I was hoping you might be able to help with some simple guidance if you don't mind.
I understand mocking within the context of unit tests, but I'm wanting to mock service calls for my ViewModels that ultimately the UI binds to. Basically, I have a ViewModel that makes a service call, which hits a database and (for example) returns a list of people, in my view I have a DataGrid that binds to the results in the ViewModel. No problem. What I want to do is instead of hitting the actual database I'd like to return mocked objects.
I have cobbled something together manually that handles this, but can you shine some light on best practices with this type of scenario? Basically what I'm doing now is I have a dummy service (both the dummy and actual service implement the same interface) and the dummy service (manually) mocks up service calls and results. I'm using dependency injection to determine which service I'm actually going to use.
Does this sound like a decent approach? Any guidance is greatly appreciated!
Yep, that works. You can use Moq to make the dummy service though.
I appreciate you Tim!
Thank you!
thanks for the great video, as always
what do you do if you want to test a class that doesn't implement an API?
do you have to "force" it into implementing one?
Interesting video Tim, I am curious first can you moq without dependency injection, specific for extension which is based of WPF.
That is harder to do, since it is a hard dependency.
Hey Tim, love your videos.. I like how you explain things. One question, my project test doesn't run at all. It does spin but at the end it just says something like "0 tests ran, 0 tests failed, 0 tests skipped." Also, the test says "Excluded from Live Unit Tests" and I'm right-clicking and choosing "Include...." doesn't seem to have an effect. Thanks!
Not sure why you are getting that issue. It sounds like something isn't configured properly but I don't know what that might be.
@@IAmTimCorey Well, I forgot to add the xunit.runner.visualstudio.. Oops.. Thanks for replying Tim!
How may Assert Statment is good to have in one test case? Is it good to have multiple?
I'll give you my opinion (there are some differing ones). I personally do as many asserts as needed to verify a test case. If a method changes three values in an object, I will usually test all three. Some people think that this should be three tests. I disagree because it is one action. So, I do as many asserts as necessary to verify that the state that has changed is as I expected.
Hi Tim,
I have a question if you got time for it:
I am trying to mock a SshClient part of Ssh.Net library which I don't have control over. The part giving me problems is that this SshClient does not implement any interface so I will have direct dependency on it. What is the best way to handle this issue?
You have a couple options. The best option is if you can isolate the calls to that library in a wrapper class that you can control (and create an interface for). You don't need to unit test the SshClient itself, just the code that uses it so you can mock it where it is relied on. The other option is to use a Fake to replace it (not nearly as clean).
Dear Tim,
One small Thing: Our database structure changes sometimes. How can i test if the the Database Structure matches my Model?
You could wrap it in your own class that you can unit test.
Hi Tim,
Thanks a lot for such a wonderful video. I appreciate your advices and sharing with us how you work (for example how far do you go with test coverage). Is there any tool/platform that you would recommend for analysing test coverage, code smells, etc (i.e. sonarqube)?
I don't really have a tool beyond what Visual Studio provides. They have some great features for test coverage, test running, etc.
Just a question, how do you handle Winform objects with autofac. I have manager/processor classes registered in autofac that will have to update winform ui but since i created the ui elements using winform designer, they are not registered with autofac. And I hesitate to touch any code made by the designer. One way is to pass the winform ui as arguments everytime i use a method but that feels tedious especially if the processor class is design specifically to update a certain winform ui element.
Every object that you instantiate, including Winforms windows, needs to be registered in Autofac. If you do manual instantiation, you negate the purpose of dependency injection. You won't need to touch designer code, though.
@@IAmTimCorey Lets say I have two projects FormsUI and FormsLibrary where FormsUI depends on FormsLibrary. I have a listboxmanager class in formslibrary that requires a listbox reference from FormsUI. How do I tell autofac to pass the reference of the listbox object created in FormsUI designer to the listboxmanager.
If your library has that tight of an integration to the UI, it isn't really a separate library. It is part of the UI layer.
I have been learning so many things from you through years and used them in my projects. I appreciate your hard work. You have a great way of explaining everything; however, just as my personal opinion, you repeat the same thing in many ways that may waste time. I am waiting to see how you mock the database for a while and you are explaining how mock is spelled, repeating why _database is needed a few times, etc.
Amazing course
Thanks!
Hi Tim! Whats your opinion of Moq's latest updates?
I'm going to do a video on it, hopefully tomorrow. The bottom line is this: the implementation wasn't great, but the people complaining are WAY more in the wrong than the creator. He asked for help, got nothing, and so he tried to get help on his own. He didn't think through all of the implications, so it wasn't the perfect solution. However, he listened and removed the problematic code immediately. Open source for free is not sustainable. We need better solutions to make sure these creators are compensated so that they can maintain the things that the whole world relies on.
@@IAmTimCorey Great response thanks! Looking forward to the video.
I second that@@IAmTimCorey
Great video Tim thanks. Never really done any unit testing as the firms I've work at don't seem to do them, so never really got into them. AutoFac... Looks like I missed a video - DI With AutoFac - YT seems to think I've watched it. I'll have to go and watch that now as I had no idea what AutoFac is.
It is definitely a good one to learn.
Another great tutorial!!
Thanks!
really good video, as always!!!
Thanks!
@IAmTimCorey -- I have a Generic-based data handler interface and associated services which I am trying to mock calls for. However, anytime I run a test, I get a NULL value from any calls to the Generic data handler. If I run the code in Production, the calls work, so I do not believe it is an issue with the way I have my services written. Any ideas what causes this kind of issue with Moq? NOTE => I am using the following NuGet Packages, in case they are the issue:
AutoFac / AutoFac.Extras.Moq = 4.1.0 / 4.2.0
XUnit 2.4.1
Moq 4.13.1
My thought is it might be an issue with AutoFac and Moq, as I already had to go back multiple versions to get Moq/AutoFac to even play well together, as it was previously failing on `var mock = AutoMock.GetLoose()`
This seems simliar to what another user below in the comments is seeing, where your code's `cls.LoadPeople()` call is returning null for them, but not others.
Thanks for the videos, they are most helpful when trying to learn new concepts (I am an older programmer, and mocking is not something we did in most other jobs I have held).
Not sure what the specific issue is but it sounds like a setup issue. Maybe run the test in debug mode and step through the code.
I wanted to ask how to go about applying testing to following scenario in following .NET Core App:
Class A is a Background service that consumes a message from a Rabbit queue.
Class B is a "MessageProcessor" class. It has a public method.
This method makes a call to a private method that invokes a public method of Class C. So Class B has a dependency on Class C.
Class C is a class that makes REST API call to an external API.
Do I have to put all 3 classes under separate tests or does it depend on what to test/what I should be testing?
So if I wanted to test the behaviour of processing a message I would put Class B under test and mock it's dependencies appropriately.
My current understanding is that I should be testing specific behaviour. Is that right?
Unfortunately my moq for my code returns null and no idea why
Time to debug.
Hi Tim,
How to appear green tick pass or red fail when unit test.
Thanks very much!
That is a Visual Studio Enterprise feature (I talked about it briefly in this video). It is called Live Unit Testing.
The feature is only available in Enterprise edition of visual studio
11:51 - "You have to have the same schema for production & testing databases" & "You always need to clean up your testing database" - well yeah, that's how I program on Ruby on Rails. Takes just installing one plugin. Mocking your database is the worst thing you can do in Testing. Mocking is used to mock things that change from run to run (e.g. requests to a remote server, Time.Now() request, probably some other things).
13:17 - There's nothing wrong with having a hundred dependencies if they all make you able to deploy your features faster and with higher quality. Why reinvent the wheel if someone made a plugin? Maintenance of incompatibility between plugins is not as bad as reinventing say a State Machine library in every project.
I can see how having hundreds of dependencies could be considered fine, but you really want a bit more simplicity per class. This comes back to the Single Responsibility Principle. If you have hundreds of dependencies (I know you were exaggerating, I'm just using that same language) then your class/method is probably doing too much. For example, if a method has a dependency on HTTPClient and IDataAccess, that's probably too much. Talking to the web and talking to the database is probably a violation of SRP. Add in an IEmailClient and a ISmsClient and now you are doing way too much in one method. At that point, you aren't doing unit testing, you are doing integration testing.
I love the stuff with Moq, but due to the fact that extension methods are not supported, when you want to mock the ILogger it becomes a real mess (LogDebug, LogInformation are extension methods) :(
You can only use the plain Log method, which is quite impractical.
What is your opinion on this?
This was of great help for my project, Thanks Corey! By the way, how would you setup your LoadPeople call if you are using LoadData multiple times with different querystrings within LoadPeople (let's assume thats a valid use case)
I have a project in C# where I try to use Dapper, MVVMCross, Moq and Xunit... Everything works, but when I try to run my Unit test with Mock objects it dosn't work! the mock object is just null... I do it just like you do in your video... If I make a very simple example, where I Mock a DBConnection with no sql or DynamicParameters, it works fine... What am I missing? is it something with Dapper or MVVMCross you can't do/Is not supported.... If I just call my code normal, without unit test, it works fine
It sounds like you have a bug in setting up your Mock. That isn't an issue specific to any of the frameworks you are using.
@@IAmTimCorey here is my test
[Fact]
public void PeopleGetByLastName_ShouldReturnOnePersonUsingMoq()
{
using (AutoMock mock = AutoMock.GetLoose())
{
DynamicParameters p = new DynamicParameters();
p.Add("@LastName", "Kjeldsen");
string sql = "select * from dbo.Person where LastName = @LastName";
mock.Mock()
.Setup(x => x.GetPersonsByLastName(sql, p))
.Returns(GetOneResult());
PeopleAccessHandler cls = mock.Create();
List actual = cls.PeopleGetByLastName("Kjeldsen"); //This just returns null
List expected = GetOneResult();
Assert.True(actual != null);
Assert.Equal(expected[0].FirstName, actual[0].FirstName);
}
}
If I don't use DynamicParameters my test works, but if I use DynamicParameters, my mock object just returns null???
If I just rund the code with DynamicParameters everything works fine and I get data back from my test DB
What am I missing?
Hello Tim, how do I turn on the check marks in my Visual Studio Enterprise? Thanks!
In the Test menu, turn on Live Unit Testing.
This feature is called Live Unit Testing in visual studio and its only available in the Enterprise edition
The problem with the Mocking in this tutorial is to rewrite the code in the test. Because let's say my class has only a public method named "input" to receive the data inserted by the user. That method checks the user data by calling a private method "checkData" and only if the data is validated it calls the private "save" method. I don't want to expose the private methods as public. How to mock the "save" private method?
You don't need to. Remember, unit tests are about testing inputs and outputs. That is what you would be testing. Since your save does some type of modification (probably sending data to the database), you could mock your database connection and make sure it was called if the data was valid. If it was not valid data, you could check to be sure the database was not called. You aren't testing the methods, you are testing how they affect things.
Hi Tim, love your videos. I am a junior - mid level software engineer trying to bring some implementation tests to my company. We use entity framework with a database for each of our clients where each DB has the same table structure (same tables and columns within those tables across all dbs). Do you have any suggestions on what framework/Design pattern to use to achieve this?
Sorry, I'm not sure I understand. Are you saying you want to do implementation testing on your clients' installations? If so, that sounds like something you want to build custom since it is post-deployment.
Hi Tim, in some next videos, could you explain something about SignalR? What do you think about this subject?
It is on the list. It is a great technology for certain situations and definitely deserves to be covered.
qq- in our case .net core code is let say "x" name it is loaded 25 input file loading into the DB. in this case how right test casework into a database like a real-world scenario? pls can u give some good hint or link?
If I understand your question, you are asking how to test things like inserting items into the database. In general, we do this very rarely. This lands in at least integration testing if not end-to-end testing. The reason for this is because we are testing how the parts fit together. You will find value here, but it is a much harder thing to test and much less valuable compared to testing the logic inside your application. Make sure that you are processing the data up to the database properly. Then, the likelihood of finding an insertion issue is much lower. End-to-end still adds value here, but it is sometimes more valuable to just have people do that testing manually.
@@IAmTimCorey Thank you Tim! can u pls share to me ur email & I will share the code
Unfortunately, I do not have time to do code reviews.