Integration testing is really useful, and any tool or framework which makes it easier will be welcomed. For .net core we are given the TestServer class and the entity framework's in memory database setup. I've built a small example, with a useful base class, which I'll present in this post.
Here's the whole code sample, including a small API in .net core 2, and integration tests prepared using xUnit:
https://github.com/simonkatanski/coreintegrationtests
In the following I'm not going into basic knowledge of Entity Framework, or the setup of .net Core API. There's plenty articles about it elsewhere. This post shouldn't also be taken as an example of good design, I'm trying to make is as small and self-contained as possible.
I'll start with showing a simple DbContext which I want to "mock" with an "in-memory" version in my tests. A small db containing some exemplary city data.
public class CityContext : DbContext, ICityContext
{
public DbSet<City> Cities { get; set; }
protected override void OnConfiguring(DbContextOptionsBuilder optionsBuilder)
=> optionsBuilder.UseSqlite("Data Source=Cities.db");
}
It is used directly in our controller (not a good thing IRL ;)) like this:
[Route("api")]
public class CityController : Controller
{
private readonly ICityContext _cityContext;
public CityController(ICityContext cityContext)
{
_cityContext = cityContext;
}
[HttpGet("cities")]
public IEnumerable<string> Get()
{
var cities = _cityContext.Cities.ToList();
if (cities.Any())
{
return cities.Select(c => c.CityName);
}
return Enumerable.Empty<string>();
}
[HttpPost("cities")]
public void Post([FromBody]City city)
{
_cityContext.Cities.Add(city);
_cityContext.SaveChanges();
}
}
As you can see it is minimal. Having created our small API we do want to create integration tests for the implemented actions. Now after creation of the integration tests project, we can create our "in-memory" version of CityContext.
public class InMemoryCityContext : CityContext
{
protected override void OnConfiguring(DbContextOptionsBuilder optionsBuilder)
=> optionsBuilder.UseInMemoryDatabase(Guid.NewGuid().ToString());
}
We derive from the context and override the OnConfiguring method. Bear in mind this might work slightly differently, if your DbContext is configured in a different way. Now to make it possible to swap our CityContext for the InMemoryCityContext implementation we need to prepare by using appropriate container registration.
In our case (we are using .net core built-in Dependency Injection IOC framework) we will use the following registration method, it will not register another ICityContext implementation, if there's already one existing in the container:
services.TryAddScoped<ICityContext, CityContext>();
This means we need to register "in-memory" version before the actual API registration takes place. Now other containers are much more robust and performing a registration overriding is much easier using them. I'm going to focus on the built-in container.
Microsoft provides the following package for integration testing: "Microsoft.AspNetCore.TestHost". It contains the TestServer class, which can use our API's Startup class and set up an in-memory API for testing.
I've built a wrapper for it, to make it easier to manage the mocked DB context.
public class ApiTestServer : IDisposable
{
private readonly TestServer _server;
public InMemoryCityContext CityContext { get; }
/// <summary>
/// A wrapper around the TestServer, which also contains the
/// EF contexts used in the API.
/// </summary>
public ApiTestServer()
{
_server = new TestServer(new WebHostBuilder()
.UseStartup<Startup>()
.ConfigureServices(RegisterDependencies));
CityContext = new InMemoryCityContext();
}
public RequestBuilder CreateRequest(string path)
{
return _server.CreateRequest(path);
}
/// <summary>
/// Register dependencies, which differ from the ordinary setup of the API.
/// For the registration here to work, you need to use the TryAdd* versions
/// of container registration methods.
/// </summary>
private void RegisterDependencies(IServiceCollection service)
{
service.AddSingleton<ICityContext, InMemoryCityContext>(serviceProvider => CityContext);
}
public void Dispose()
{
CityContext?.Dispose();
_server?.Dispose();
}
}
As you can see above the class exposes the Context outside, so that we can both set our test data in the context, and validate the changes introduced by the API. It also exposes the RequestBuilder, which allows us to send http requests. ApiTestServer registers the context as a singleton, the context is later used thanks to the TryAddScoped registration of the original base context.
An example created with xUnit:
[Fact]
public async Task GivenNonEmptyDb_ThenExpectCityToBeAdded()
{
using (var server = new ApiTestServer())
{
//Arrange
server.CityContext.Add(new City { CityName = "Bristol", Population = 100000, Id = 0 });
server.CityContext.SaveChanges();
var cityToAdd = new City { CityName = "Berlin", Population = 100000 };
var stringData = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(cityToAdd);
var request = server.CreateRequest("/api/cities")
.And(c => c.Content = new StringContent(stringData, Encoding.UTF8, "application/json"))
//Act
var response = await request.PostAsync();
//Assert
Assert.True(response.StatusCode == HttpStatusCode.OK);
Assert.True(server.CityContext.Cities.Count() == 2);
}
}
In the example we:
- create our test server
- setup the context (state of the db before the API call)
- prepare the request
- call the API with the request
- assert the context state
This way, in a real-life case, by adding all our contexts into the ApiTestServer class we can prepare a complete setup for our DB and our integration tests.
UPDATE:
I've explicitly set the ID to 0 for the entity added to the context prior to the http call. Obviously that's the default value for that parameter - but in case you were using some special data generator like Fizzware's NBuilder, you might forget about setting it to 0 explicitly and struggle to find the reason why EF is not assigning a new value to the newly added entity. For the Entity Framework's primary key's integer value generator to generate a new value it has to have 0 assigned, otherwise it'll be omitted from the generation.
