Actually, mocking isn’t quite the word (but we’ll talk about that in a moment).
At Cognitive X, we specialize in web development using ASP.NET MVC (currently using V4), and we very much love Test Driven Development. So as part of our development process with MVC, we write tests for our Controller Actions. One of the problems that we run into with testing controllers outside of the MVC framework is that they are not fully setup and many pieces are missing that allow the controller to function properly. The biggest one being ModelState.
For example, given the following piece of code, no matter what, it always returns true because the ModelState is actually empty, when run outside the normal MVC pipeline:
if (ModelState.IsValid)
{
// Perform action
}
So inorder to properly test our controllers, we wrote a method that would take the model and setup ModelState correctly (including running all validations on the model). It was quite easy with V3 of ASP.NET MVC to do this, but with MVC 4 and the introduction of so many new providers (ModelMetaDataProviders, ValueProviders, etc), the old way no longer worked. I spent a morning chasing ModelStateDictionaries through the MVC code (thank goodness for ILSpy, it made my life so much easier), trying to figure out where it actually got filled out. What I eventually hit upon was the code hidden within the Controller.TryValidateModel, which did exactly what I wanted it to do. The only problem is that it’s protected internal and no good for a general support extension. So I pulled the code out, rewrote it a bit, and here it is:
public static void SetupModel<T>(this Controller ctrl, T model)
{
if (ctrl.ControllerContext == null)
{
Mock<ControllerContext> ctx = new Mock<ControllerContext>();
ctrl.ControllerContext = ctx.Object;
}
DataAnnotationsModelMetadataProvider provider = new DataAnnotationsModelMetadataProvider();
var metadataForType = provider.GetMetadataForType(() => model, typeof(T));
var temp = new ViewDataDictionary();
foreach (var kv in new RouteValueDictionary(model))
{
temp.Add(kv.Key, kv.Value);
}
DefaultModelBinder binder = new DefaultModelBinder();
ctrl.ViewData = new ViewDataDictionary(temp) { ModelMetadata = metadataForType, Model = model };
foreach (ModelValidationResult current in ModelValidator.GetModelValidator(metadataForType, ctrl.ControllerContext).Validate(null))
{
ctrl.ViewData.ModelState.AddModelError(CreateSubPropertyName("", current.MemberName), current.Message);
}
}
So like I said, Mocking is not really the right word for it, it’s actually setting up ModelState to contain the right validation information / model errors, so that controller actions work as expected.