What do you do when you are writing a test for a piece of code that calls out to an ‘out of your control’ service such as a web service or email server?  If you are like most of us, you simply allow your test to make the call and ‘hope’ that the service is up.  However, this is really bad.  Having your test make calls to a service that is out of your control can lead to ‘spontaneous’ breakages.  It also puts dependencies in your test, another bad thing.

If you are using RhinoMocks (could also use NMock, but I like RhinoMocks) and StructureMap (could use any IoC/DI container, but I like StructureMap) it is pretty easy and straight forward to ‘Mock’ out those services.

Quick background on this code. 
This test was writing to verify that when a web service is down (IMilesServiceContract) that an email (IEmailer) will be sent.  Because I cannot force the service to be down, I have to ‘fake’ it out with Mocks.  And because I don’t care that the email actually gets sent I also will fake this out.

Below is the code that will allow you to ‘Mock’ out a web service and them email service

Code Explained

Generating the stubs
Because I don’t want to use the actual concrete classes, I am going to create stubs of them via RhinoMocks

Setting the expectations
Once I have the stubs created, I want to set the expectations on the methods for each of the stubs that I want to be called.  I don’t care about the actual parameter values used, so that is why I use the IgnoreArguments method.  It is here you set the default return value.

Injecting the stubs into StructureMap
In order for StructureMap to use the stubs, you need to ‘inject’ them in so that when the next call to create the object via the ObjectFactory is called the stubs will be returned.

ReplayAll
This tells the RhinoMocks engine that all setup work is finished and to set the mocking eninge

Few Gotcha’s to look out for

1. You must set any expectations PRIOR to using the object/stub.  Otherwise you will get an exception.
2. It’s best/easiest to inject interfaces into StructureMap.  I have issues when ever I inject concrete classes.

 
Till next time,