AzamSharp

Recently, I came across a situation where my WebMethod was accessing the Session object. This particular WebMethod was used extensively by the application so I decided to write unit test for it. Here is a simple example of a webmethod.

 [WebMethod(EnableSession=true)]
        public int foo()
        {
            int userId = Convert.ToInt32(HttpContext.Current.Session["UserId"]);

            return userId;
        }

First of all I don't really think that using HttpContext inside a WebMethod is a good idea. One of the main purpose of using web service is to distribute the application in multi-tier and to provide independent consumable services. In this situation the access to a session will fail since they belong to different virtual directories.

Writing unit tests for these web methods is hard and time consuming. So, I thought of refactoring the method and came up with the following:

 [WebMethod(EnableSession=true)]
        public int foo(int userId)
        {
            return userId;
        }

Now, the foo method takes the userId as a parameter instead of extracting it from the session object.

Let's take a different scenario where you just want to unit test the session object. This time you can mock the session. Take a look at the code below:

 [Test]
        public void should_be_able_to_mock_session_object()
        {
            string page = "";
            string vDir = "/VirtualRoomWebApps";
            string phyDir = @"C:\Projects\VirtualRoom\VirtualRoomSolution\VirtualRoomWebApps\";
            TextWriter tw = new StringWriter();

            HttpWorkerRequest worker = new SimpleWorkerRequest(vDir, phyDir, "VirtualRoomService.asmx", String.Empty, tw);

            HttpContext context = new HttpContext(worker);

            IHttpSessionState sessionState = new SimpleSessionState();

            Mockery mockery = new Mockery();
            var mock = mockery.NewMock<IHttpSessionState>();

            Expect.Once.On(mock).Method("Add");

            mock.Add("something", "somevalue");

            mockery.VerifyAllExpectationsHaveBeenMet();                 
        }

SimpleSessionState inherits from the IHttpSessionState interface. The implementation is shown below:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Web.SessionState;

namespace TestSuite.Helpers
{
    public class SimpleSessionState : IHttpSessionState
    {
        private Dictionary<String, Object> _container = new Dictionary<string,object>();

      public void Add(string name, object value)
        {
            _container.Add(name, value);
        }    

     
        public object this[string name]
        {
            get
            {
                return _container[name];
            }
            set
            {
                _container[name] = value;
            }
        }        
    }
}

The lesson learned is "If you cannot easily write unit test for a method then refactor or redesign the method".