In spirit, this is a follow-up to my recent post on unit-testing email functionality.

This probably doesn’t apply to those of you who have reached O/RM nirvana with such tools as NHibernate etc… ADO is probably just a distant memory, not unlike those vague embarassing recollections of soiling yourself in a public location long ago.

But I digress.

For the rest of us, we sometimes need to get knee-deep in ADO. For example, even though Subtext abstracts away the data access via the provider model, I still want to test the data provider itself, right?

Subtext’s has a series of methods that each call a stored procedure and return an IDataReader. The returned data reader is passed to another class which populates entity objects using the data reader.

In my unit tests, it would be nice to have a means to attach a data reader to an in-memory object structure rather than directly to the database. That is where my StubDataReader class comes into play.

It implements the IDataReader interface and provides a quick and dirty way to create an in-memory object structure. By quick and dirty I mean that you do not need to build out a table schema first. The code to set up the stub data reader is quite simple.

Single Result Set

If you are dealing with a Data Reader that should only return one result set (which seems to be the vast majority of cases), then setting it up would look like this:

DateTime testDate = DateTime.Now;
StubResultSet resultSet 
   = new StubResultSet("col0", "col1", "col2");
resultSet.AddRow(1, "Test", testDate);
resultSet.AddRow(2, "Test2", testDate.AddDays(1));
            
StubDataReader reader = new StubDataReader(resultSet);

//Advance to first row.
Assert.IsTrue(reader.Read());

// Assertions            
Assert.AreEqual(1, reader["col0"]);
Assert.AreEqual("Test", reader["col1"]);
Assert.AreEqual(testDate, reader["col2"]);

In the above snippet, I create an instance of StubResultSet with a list of the column names. I then make a couple of calls to AddRow. Notice that AddRow takes in a param array of object instances. This is the quick and dirty part. Since the StubDataReader doesn’t require setting up a schema before-hand, it will not validate that the objects added to the columns of the rows are the correct type. It just doesn’t have that information. But this isn’t all that important since this class is specifically for use in unit testing scenarios.

Multiple Result Sets

Not everyone realizes this, but you can iterate over multiple result sets with a single data reader instance. Simulating that scenario is quite easy.

DateTime testDate = DateTime.Now;
StubResultSet resultSet 
   = new StubResultSet("col0", "col1", "col2");
resultSet.AddRow(1, "Test", testDate);

StubResultSet anotherResultSet 
   = new StubResultSet("first", "second");
anotherResultSet.AddRow((decimal)1.618, "Foo");
anotherResultSet.AddRow((decimal)2.718, "Bar");
anotherResultSet.AddRow((decimal)3.142, "Baz");

StubDataReader reader 
   = new StubDataReader(resultSet, anotherResultSet);

//Advance to first row.
Assert.IsTrue(reader.Read());

Assert.AreEqual(1, reader["col0"]);

//Advance to second ResultSet.
Assert.IsTrue(reader.NextResult(), "Expected next result set");

//Advance to first row.
Assert.IsTrue(reader.Read());
Assert.AreEqual((decimal)1.618, reader["first"]);
Assert.AreEqual("Foo", reader["second"]);

In this snippet, I create two StubResultSet instances and pass it to the constructor of the DataReader. Afterwards, you can see that the code makes sure to test that the NextResult functions properly.

The above code snippets above are excerpts from the unit tests I wrote for this code. Although this code is more complete than the mail server example, there are a couple methods that haven’t been well tested because I have never run into a situation in which I needed them. I put in various comments so feel free to improve this and let me know about it. This code is within the UnitTests.Subtext project in the Subtext solution in our Subversion repository.

You can download the code here , but as before, I do not guarantee I will update the link to have the latest code. You can access our Subversion repository for the latest.