Using Overridden members with Partial Mocks for abstract Types

For a serious unit testing mocking framework is a required piece. It allows creating mocks for dependencies we don't want to instantiate in our code. We discussed about partial mocks long time ago [refer post]. They are specially useful for testing abstract types. Actually they provide a proxy implementation for the virtual / abstract members.

In this post we are going to discuss a special case when we have overridden some members of a parent type. We might not have overridden the other members or we just are good with the default null proxy implementation. Generally the mocking framework would just provide proxy implementation for all virtual / abstract members. How can we make sure that it uses the implementation in our type if we have provided so.

For our demo project, we are using nunit with Moq. Let's create a test project, and add the following nuget packages.



Here we have introduced BaseClass with a public member [Calculate] and two abstract members [CalculateCore and SomeOtherMethod]. It is inherited from another type ChildClass, which provides an implementation of CalculateCore only.


Now let us try to add unit tests for testing the functionality for this type. Here we have added a methods to check the result of Calculate method. Since we have added a definition of CalculateCore member, it should be adding the two parameters and just returns the result.


When we run this test, we get failure. If we look at the result, it doesn't actually make a lot of sense. Actually it is not even using the CalculateCore implementation from ChildClass.



But can we actually tell mocking framework to avoid providing implementation of overridden members. Actually Moq supports this by providing CallBase member for Mock. Here we have another implementation of the same ChildClass. The only difference is that mock has this member set. Now it should use the overridden member, CalculateCore, and test should pass.


And test passes now, Zindabad!!!

SSIS Unit Testing Framework

Hi guyz,

I have always been displeased being not able to unit test my packages
created in SSIS. This was because there was no way to do this.

But the days of darkness are gone. SQL Server Integration Services
Community has felt this need of the day and has come up with a Unit Testing
Framework. Now guyz! if you are not from development background even then
you don't need to worry because no .net code has to be written to write
your unit tests. All you have to create is an XML files with your commands.
So you don't need to know any .net code. Still I have not found out if I
want to write some .net code then how can I do that.

The thing I liked most is that this Unit Test framework is based on xUnit.
It means it follows the same setUP, test. and tearDown flow. There is also
support for Test Suites. The developers of Microsoft Dynamics AX should be
happy to listen to this news.

To keep ease in consideratino, a GUI has been added to create Unit Tests.

I am copying a sample XML used for this framework from codeplex.



You can download it from the following codeplex.com link:
SSIS Unit Testing Framework

You can see that it is just version 1.0 release in Aug, 2008. So
don't expect it to be all bug free.

You would be glad to know that the utility is available as .

So I can't wait to put my hands on this. Share your experience with me
about this.

Enjoy!