AutoMocking Container

At work, I am lucky enough to work with a few bright chaps (sadly some of them are a lot younger than me, which is making me question my existence :-( , but on the other hand, it is always good to learn new things).

One of those new things for me happened the other day, where this dude at work showed me MSpec for TDD/BDD, and I have to say it was pretty awesome. The thing that I liked the most was the “AutoMocking” feature.

So what is this “AutoMocking” that I am talking about, and why is it cool? Well, quite simply, it alleviates the brittle relationship with code and tests in their infancy, and allows tests to create constructor injection parameters automatically.

I should point out that this pattern really suits new code bases, that may still be a bit in flux, it is not really that much use for well established code bases that have been around and settled for a while.

It is also worth noting that this pattern can be used with code that doesn’t use any IOC/dependency injection at all, it is purely a testing concern.

So what is it all about?

Well, say you have this class:

public class Autobooker
{
    private readonly ILogger logger;
    private readonly IRateProvider rateProvider;
    private readonly IBooker booker;

    public Autobooker(ILogger logger, IRateProvider rateProvider, IBooker booker)
    {
        this.logger = logger;
        this.rateProvider = rateProvider;
        this.booker = booker;
    }

    public void BookDeal(string ccy1, string ccy2, decimal amount)
    {
        logger.Log(string.Format("Booked deal for {0}/{1}", ccy1, ccy2));
        decimal rate = rateProvider.GetRate(string.Join("", ccy1, ccy2));
        booker.Book(ccy1, ccy2, rate, amount);
    }
}

Which you may write a test case for something like this (I am using NUnit and Moq, but you may prefer your own tools to these).

[TestFixture]
public class TestCases
{
    private IWindsorContainer container;

    [SetUp]
    public void SetUp()
    {
        container = new WindsorContainer();
        container.Install(new BookerInstaller());
    }

    [TestCase("EUR", "GBP", 1500)]
    [TestCase("GBP", "EUR", 2200)]
    public void TypicalTestCase(string ccy1, string ccy2, decimal amount)
    {
        //setup
        string ccyPair = string.Join("", ccy1, ccy2);
        var rate = 1;
        var loggerMock = new Mock<ILogger>();
        var rateProviderMock = new Mock<IRateProvider>();
        var bookerMock = new Mock<IBooker>();

        rateProviderMock
            .Setup(x => x.GetRate(ccyPair)).Returns(1);

        var autobooker = new Autobooker(loggerMock.Object, rateProviderMock.Object, bookerMock.Object);
        autobooker.BookDeal(ccy1, ccy2, amount);

        //assert
        loggerMock
            .Verify(x => x.Log(string.Format("Booked deal for {0}/{1}", ccy1, ccy2)),
                Times.Exactly(1));

        rateProviderMock
            .Verify(x => x.GetRate(string.Join("", ccy1, ccy2)), Times.Exactly(rate));

        bookerMock
            .Verify(x => x.Book(ccy1, ccy2, rate, amount), Times.Exactly(1));
    }
}

The problem with this code is that it is extremely coupled to the design. What would happen if the Autobooker class needed to take a new constructor dependency, say something like this:

public class Autobooker
{
    private readonly ILogger logger;
    private readonly IRateProvider rateProvider;
    private readonly IBooker booker;
    private readonly IPricer pricer;

    public Autobooker(ILogger logger, IRateProvider rateProvider, IBooker booker, IPricer pricer)
    {
        this.logger = logger;
        this.rateProvider = rateProvider;
        this.booker = booker;
        this.pricer = pricer;
    }
}

This should immediately ring alarm bells that your existing test cases will now break, but what can we do about it? This is where “AutoMocking” can help. Let us take a look at this, shall we.

So the first step is to decide on a nice IOC container that you think is fit for the job. For me, this is Castle Windsor. So that is that decision made, so what do we need to do now that we have made that decision? Well, all we really need to do is get it to automatically create our Mocks for us. SO what does that look like? Well, for me, it looks like this:

public class AutoMoqServiceResolver : ISubDependencyResolver
{
    private IKernel kernel;

    public AutoMoqServiceResolver(IKernel kernel)
    {
        this.kernel = kernel;
    }

    public bool CanResolve(
        CreationContext context,
        ISubDependencyResolver contextHandlerResolver,
        ComponentModel model,
        DependencyModel dependency)
    {
        return dependency.TargetType.IsInterface;
    }

    public object Resolve(
        CreationContext context,
        ISubDependencyResolver contextHandlerResolver,
        ComponentModel model,
        DependencyModel dependency)
    {
        var mock = typeof(Mock<>).MakeGenericType(dependency.TargetType);
        return ((Mock)kernel.Resolve(mock)).Object;
    }
}

The next step is to create some sort of IOC registration for the system under test (SOT), which for me means the Autobooker type. So we do that as follows:

public class BookerInstaller : IWindsorInstaller
{
    public void Install(
        IWindsorContainer container,
        IConfigurationStore store)
    {
        container.Kernel.Resolver.AddSubResolver(new AutoMoqServiceResolver(container.Kernel));
        container.Register(Component.For(typeof(Mock<>)));

        container.Register(Classes
            .FromAssemblyContaining<Booker.Autobooker>()
            .Pick()
            .WithServiceSelf()
            .LifestyleTransient());
    }
}

With that all in place, I can now write non brittle code, that will get the object I want to test from the IOC container, where all its dependencies will try to be satisfied by the automocking IOC container. So my test case now looks like this:

[TestCase("EUR", "GBP", 1500)]
[TestCase("GBP", "EUR", 2200)]
public void TestBooking(string ccy1, string ccy2, decimal amount)
{
    var autobooker = container.Resolve<Autobooker>();
    string ccyPair = string.Join("", ccy1, ccy2);
    var rate = 1;
            
    //arrange
    container.Resolve<Mock<IRateProvider>>()
        .Setup(x => x.GetRate(ccyPair)).Returns(1);

    autobooker.BookDeal(ccy1,ccy2,amount);

    //assert
    container.Resolve<Mock<ILogger>>()
        .Verify(x => x.Log(string.Format("Booked deal for {0}/{1}", ccy1, ccy2)),
            Times.Exactly(1));

    container.Resolve<Mock<IRateProvider>>()
        .Verify(x => x.GetRate(string.Join("", ccy1, ccy2)), Times.Exactly(rate));
            
    container.Resolve<Mock<IBooker>>()
        .Verify(x => x.Book(ccy1,ccy2,rate,amount), Times.Exactly(1));

}

See how I no longer need to declare the mocks, I just define their behavior, which I think is cool.