How to Unit Test the JSon Result in MVC Unit Test Case

Introduction

Once you are writing a unit test case for your MVC controller, sometimes, you face the issue if the controller return type is JSON AS in the given example.

I have created a method SearchRecords in MVC controller. You can write your logic in the code.

public JsonResult SearchRecords(GridSettings gridSettings)
{

//....Your code logic here

//....

return Json(jsonData, JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet);

}

Here, I am taking an input parameter as gridSettings. You can take or create any method which just returns the type as JsonResult.

Using the Code

The JSon data which I will retrieve on our view will be as follows:

    var jsonData = new{
total = 6
page = 1,
records = 51
};

Now, in the unit test case where I will test this result in very simple way.

     [TestMethod]
        public void GetData()
        {
            IMAPDataAccess objDataAccess = new MAPDataAccess();
            GridSettings gridSettings = new GridSettings();

            var controller = new YourControllerName(objDataAccess);
            gridSettings.IsSearch = false;
            gridSettings.PageIndex = 1;
            gridSettings.PageSize = 10;

            var result = controller.SearchData(gridSettings) as JsonResult;

        IDictionary<string, object> data = 
        (IDictionary<string, object>)new System.Web.Routing.RouteValueDictionary(result.Data);

            Assert.AreEqual(1, data["page"]);
            Assert.AreEqual(51, data["records"]);
            Assert.AreEqual(6, data["total"]);
        }

Points of Interest

In this way, you can normally write the unit test case for json return type instead of using json data in Assert.AreEqual.

History

• 13^th April, 2016: Initial version