.NET MAUI – Forget Me Not – 7 – Unit Testing

Picking up where we left off, I want to add unit tests to my program. Now, I know, I should have been using unit tests all along. I have no excuse and hang my head in shame.

To get started, I’ve decided to add xUnit through NuGet. Easy peasy. But it won’t work. The full explanation is here. Great article. Here, in a nutshell are the steps you need to perform:

Create an xUnit test project in the same solution as ForgetMeNot
Make sure it runs
Add a reference to the ForgetMeNot project
This wil not run yet. Here is where the fun begins
First, open up the ForgetMeNot project and change the TargetFrameworks to

<TargetFrameworks>net6.0;net6.0-android;net6.0-ios;net6.0-maccatalyst</TargetFrameworks>

6. Replace the output statement with

<OutputType Condition="'$(TargetFramework)' != 'net6.0'">Exe</OutputType>

7. Unload ForgetMeNot, reload it, close Visual Studio, open Visual Studio and voila! it will work

(The whys and wherefores are explained very well in the article referenced above)

NSubstitute for mocking

We are now almost ready to begin. I want to use mocking from the very beginning. Until about a weak ago, I’d have installed Moq, but I’m intrigued by NSubstitute, so I’m going to use that.

After assuring myself that the default xUnit test works, I’ll add a file called BuddyTests. In there I will add my first test: ShouldPopulateBuddies. I want to make sure that calling Init() will populate the list of buddies (actually, it could return no buddies, but right now I just want to get this test working).

 [Fact]
 public async Task ShouldPopulateBuddies()
 {
     var buddies = new List<Buddy>();
     var buddy = new Buddy();
     buddies.Add(buddy);
     var buddyService = Substitute.For<IBuddyService>();
     buddyService.GetBuddies().Returns(buddies);
     var buddyListVM = new BuddyListViewModel(buddyService);
     await buddyListVM.Init();
     Assert.True( buddyListVM.Buddies?.Count > 0);

 }

So what is going on here? First I create an empty list of Buddy objects and I create an instance of Buddy which I add to that list.

Next (and here is the cool part) I create a mock for my service with that one line

var buddyService = Substitute.For<IBuddyService>();

Remember that Substitute wants interfaces, so earlier I went to each class in my services, put the cursor on the class name and used Refactor->Extract->ExtractInterface which brought up this wonderful dialog box:

I clicked on Select Public to get the public methods and Its own file to put the new interface in a file named IBuddyService.cs. R# is even nice enough to tack the interface name onto the class declaration.

OK, enough digression. My next step is to tell the mock that when the BuddyService’s GetBuddies method is returned, it should return the list of Buddies we just created.

We are now ready to create an instance of the ViewModel and call init() on it. It will use the service we passed in (the mock) and will thus populate its list of buddies with our dummy list and the Assert will pass.

Cool, eh?

This also tells me that I need to handle the case when the list is empty. That means I need to look long and hard at Init() and possibly add another test to prove that the corner case does not cause a problem.

Wrapping Up

It turns out that simple unit tests with mocking is not all that hard to do; and nSubstitute has a lot less ceremony than Moq. I’m going to stay with it for a while and see if I run off a cliff.

Since all the source code changes are already in this blog post, I won’t update the online source until I’ve written some more tests.

Shout-out to Daniel Hindrikes for helping me get started on unit testing for MAUI

See next posting for more unit testing using Fluent asserts.

About Jesse Liberty

Jesse Liberty has three decades of experience writing and delivering software projects and is the author of 2 dozen books and a couple dozen online courses. Liberty is a Senior AI Engineer at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, and was a Team Lead and Senior Software Engineer for various corporations, a Senior Technical Evangelist for Microsoft, a Distinguished Software Engineer for AT&T, a VP for Information Services for Citibank and a Software Architect for PBS. He is a 21 year Microsoft MVP.

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