Making Machine.Specifications less ‘machiney’

    public class When_a_content_admin_asks_for_a_non_existent_page
    {
        Establish that;

        Because of;

        It Should_check_the_repository;

        It Should_present_a_blank_add_content_screen;

        It Should_auto_populate_the_url_field;
    }
	

Now of course to do unit testing you must be able to do mocking/stubbing/faking etc…, I am normally a user of Moq and that is what I use in my Mspec test to establish my mocks. While it works well, all the noise it takes to arrange all of my mocks at times bothers me. While the noise was irritating I just dealt with it because setting up mocks is just something you have to do, but luckily I recently discovered somebody else had the motivation to

actually do something about it.

 

 

 

Machine.Fakes is a compliment to Machine.Specifications and reduces the obligatory mocking and dependency injection code in your tests and replaces it with a bit of magic. Machine.Fakes itself does not depend on a particular mocking framework, it uses a plugin style that lets you use any framework of your choosing. As I write this the options available (on NuGet) are Moq, FakeItEasy, Rhino.Mocks, & NSubstitute.

 

Here is an example of a simple MVC controller test of mine using just MSpec & Moq.

public class When_a_content_admin_asks_for_a_non_existent_page
    {
        Establish that = () =>
        {
            var auth = new Mock<Authorization>();
            auth.Setup(x => x.IsContentAdmin(GivenIt.IsAny<HttpContextBase>()))
                .Returns(true);

            _repo = new Mock<ContentRepository>();
            _repo.Setup(x => x.Exists("a/bogus/url"))
                .Returns(false);

            _controller = new MeekController(_repo.Object, auth.Object);
        };

        Because of = () =>
            _result = _controller.Manage("/a/bogus/url");

        It Should_check_the_repository = () =>
            _repo.Verify(x => x.Exists("a/bogus/url"), Times.Once());

        It Should_present_a_blank_add_content_screen = () =>
            _result.AssertViewRendered().ForView("Manage");

        It Should_auto_populate_the_url_field = () =>
            (_result.AssertViewRendered().Model as Content.Manage).ManageUrl.ShouldNotBeEmpty();

        static ActionResult _result;
        static MeekController _controller;
        static Mock<ContentRepository> _repo;
}
	

 

public class When_a_content_admin_asks_for_a_non_existent_page : WithSubject<MeekController>
    {
        Establish that = () =>
            {
                The<Authorization>()
                    .WhenToldTo(x => x.IsContentAdmin(GivenIt.IsAny<HttpContextBase>()))
                    .Return(true);

                The<ContentRepository>()
                    .WhenToldTo(x => x.Exists("a/bogus/url"))
                    .Return(false);
            };

        Because of = () =>
            _result = Subject.Manage("/a/bogus/url");

        It Should_check_the_repository = () =>
            The<ContentRepository>().WasToldTo(x => x.Exists("a/bogus/url")).OnlyOnce();

        It Should_present_a_blank_add_content_screen = () =>
            _result.AssertViewRendered().ForView("Manage");

        It Should_auto_populate_the_url_field = () =>
            (_result.AssertViewRendered().Model as Content.Manage).ManageUrl.ShouldNotBeEmpty();

        static ActionResult _result;
    }
	

There are a few things to point out

 

It did not reduce the lines of code a ton but but this is a pretty lean test to begin with, the important part is that we removed most of the plumbing code that had nothing to do with setting expectations.