Poor Man's Mocks

Intro

TL;DR: A thin library that lets you create and use your own mocks by learning just 3 methods.

This is a small .NET library that makes it easier to implement mock objects for testing.

As the name implies, this is not intended to be a full-fledged mocking framework. It's for cases where, for one reason or another, you can't or don't want to use a more complete framework.

In those cases, the easiest path to mocking is to create your own mock classes. You could do that and not have to use third party code - not even this library!

However, that really only works for simple test scenarios. The more scenarios you have, the more complicated and time consuming things become: you have to keep modifying your mock's logic to account for different scenarios, or, keep implementing additional mocks for each scenario.

This library gives you the minimal functionality you need to create your own mocks while still being productive. It allows you to:

• create a single mock for a given interface, and,
• make the mock behave any way you want - right from the unit test.

This means the mock is reusable, which significantly reduces the amount of work you have to do. At the same time, you get almost complete visibility into and control of the mock, since the mocking layer is very thin, which also means the learning curve is minimal.

If these sound like good things for your particular situation, then this library might be useful to you.

Usage

Assume there is an IMessenger interface that your application depends on. You want to test how the MessageConsumer class uses the Hello() method on that interface. There are essentially two steps to doing this:

1. Implement the mock by deriving from the Mock class:

       internal class MockMessenger : Mock, IMessenger
       {
           public string Hello()
           {
               return this.RunCustomBehaviorOr(() => "Howdy!", () => this.Hello());
           }
       }
       

2. Use the class in a unit test:

• This uses the mock as implemented:

      [TestMethod]
      public void TestGetGreeting()
      {
          // Set up.
          var mock = new MockMessenger();
          var consumer = new MessageConsumer(mock);
      
          // This should call IMessenger for a greeting.
          var greeting = consumer.GetGreeting();
        
          Assert.AreEqual("Howdy!", greeting);
      }

• This uses the mock to do something besides its normal behavior:

      [TestMethod]
      public void TestHelloCalledOnce()
      {
          // Set up.
          var mock = new MockMessenger();
          var consumer = new MessageConsumer(mock);
      
          // Modify the mock to let us know how many times it's called.
          var calls = 0;
          mock.AddBehavior(() => mock.Hello(), () => calls++);
      
          // This should call IMessenger once.
          consumer.GetGreeting();
      
          Assert.AreEqual(1, calls);
      }

• This uses the mock to completely override its normal behavior:

      [TestMethod]
      public void TestHelloWithDifferentGreeting()
      {
          // Set up.
          var mock = new MockMessenger();
          var consumer = new MessageConsumer(mock);
      
          // Modify the mock to return a different greeting.
          mock.SetBehavior(() => mock.Hello(), () => "Hey there!");
      
          // Get a greeting.
          var greeting = consumer.GetGreeting();
      
          Assert.AreEqual("Hey there!", greeting);
      }

• An interesting variation is a method that takes arguments. Assume there's a new IMessenger.Hello(string name) overload, and a corresponding method in MessageConsumer that takes a name as well.

  You would implement the method in MockMessenger like this:

      internal class MockMessenger : Mock, IMessenger
      {
          // [...]
        
          public string Hello(string name)
          {
              return this.RunCustomBehaviorOr(
                  () => "Howdy!",
                  () => this.Hello(default),
                  name);
          }
      }

  And then you'd be able to use the argument passed to Hello(string) when overriding the mock's behavior:

      [TestMethod]
      public void TestHelloWithName()
      {
          // Set up.
          var mock = new MockMessenger();
          var consumer = new MessageConsumer(mock);
    
          // Modify the mock to return a greeting with a passed-in name.
          mock.SetBehavior(
              () => mock.Hello(default),
              (string nme) => "Hello " + nme + "!");
    
          // Get a greeting.
          var greeting = consumer.GetGreeting("World");
    
          Assert.AreEqual("Hello World!", greeting);
      }

Details

The Mock class is, clearly, the core of the library. It provides the facilities to specify what the derived mock class should do by default, and to modify it with custom behavior during tests.

The class leverages lambda expressions extensively, particularly for specifying member names. This does add some noise to calls, but it has many benefits.

That is, the alternative would've been to specify member names as strings, which would've made tests very brittle, would've made it difficult to differentiate between overloads, and would've also required much more traditional, and complicated, reflection.

By taking expressions, we avoid these downsides, while taking advantage of compiler and tooling support (e.g., type safety, safe refactoring, Intellisense, etc).

The class can be thought of as a specialized container of behaviors: it stores the behaviors you assign, with a mapping to the interface member they modify, and simply selects the behavior(s) to run when the interface member is called.

Accordingly, there are three types of behaviors the Mock deals with, which basically map to the methods you need to know to use it:

• Default: This is the behavior that will run when nothing else is specified, and it's set by calling RunCustomBehaviorOr() from within members of a derived mock class.

  Looking at the examples in the previous section, the default behavior is what returns the string "Howdy!".

  You set this once when implementing the mock, and after this, there's mostly no need to worry about this again.

• Added: An added behavior runs along with the default behavior, and is set by calling AddBehavior() from a unit test.

  For the second test method in the previous section, this is what counts calls, but note that it does not prevent Hello() from returning "Howdy!".

  This is probably the most-used kind of behavior. It allows you to augment what the mock does without disturbing or having to re-implement the default behavior.

  You can use this to keep track of things, or to simulate an additional condition, before or after the call (more on this below).

• Replaced: A replacement behavior runs instead of the default behavior, and is set by calling SetBehavior() from a unit test.

  For the third test method in the previous section, this is what returns the custom string "Hey there!", replacing the default, "Howdy!".

  This is most useful when you need to completely override default behavior to test some condition, but you can also use it when you simply don't care for the default behavior.

When deciding between adding or replacing behavior, simply ask whether you want the default behavior or not. In some cases, there is no real difference between the two, e.g., when the behavior throws an exception. It's also possible to run both kinds of behaviors on the same member, which can be occasionally useful.

There are quite a few overloads of AddBehavior() and SetBehavior(); they exist to support members that return something versus ones that don't, and to support members that take arguments.

There are also extensions that show up as overloads of these methods, and which are no more than a convenience for doing this:

messengerMock.SetBehavior(m => m.Hello(), () => "Hey there!");

instead of this:

messengerMock.SetBehavior(() => messengerMock.Hello(), () => "Hey there!");

Besides a more succinct call, they are also useful when you resolve a mock from a factory or dependency container, but you won't use the mock for anything else, so you don't want to assign it to a variable:

container.Resolve<MessengerMock>().SetBehavior(m => m.Hello(), () => "Hey!");

Finally, there are a couple options for running custom behavior, which are specified on the object returned by AddBehavior() and SetBehavior().

One of the options applies to both added and replaced behavior, and allows you to run the behavior only once, as opposed to every time the member is called. The second option applies only to added behavior, and allows you to specify whether it should run before or after the default behavior.

For more details, see the in-code XML documentation, or, for additional examples and use cases, take a look at the unit tests included with the library.

Constraints

• This library only works for mocking proper .NET interfaces.

  If your dependency is a class, then this can't be used because your mock would then need to inherit from two different classes, which is not allowed (and you're not about to derive all your dependencies from Mock... right?).

• This works for methods, properties, and indexers - the most common members you'll need to modify.

  This basically means events, or newer interface member types allowed in C# 8, may or may not work. It may be possible to add support for some of these things, but it's not something I have needed in day-to-day use, so it's hard to see the benefit.

• This currently only works for interface members with up to 4 arguments.

  Again, this has been enough in my experience (more than that and things start to smell, i.e., the member should probably take an argument container object instead), but there is no technical reason why more arguments couldn't be supported in the future.

Install

Get the nuget: Install-Package PoorMan.Mocks -Version 1.0.1

You can also simply clone this and integrate into your project, of course.