ASP.NET MVC - Faking ControllerContext to test HttpContext.Current.User and IPrincipal

This was pretty straightforward but I didn’t find it written up anywhere on the web so here goes. What follows is how I addressed testing IPrincipal in ASP.NET MVC using xunit.net

Let’s start with the test:

[Fact]
public void changes_password() {
  //arrange
  var controller = ObjectFactory.GetInstance<AccountController>();
  controller.ControllerContext = new TestControllerContext();
  //act
  var result = controller.ChangePassword("password", "p455w0rd", "p455w0rd");
  //assert
  var viewResult = Assert.IsType<RedirectToRouteResult>(result);
  }

notice line 5. why are we setting a custom ControllerContext here? ControllerContext tells the current controller about things like HttpContext, which will be unavailable during tests (whoops!) This is needed because somewhere in the Action code, I am making a call into User.Identity.Name, which is supplied by HttpContext at runtime. Again, since this isn’t available during testing, I have to tell the controller how to find the fake httpcontext used then.

For this project, I’m using simple hand-rolled stubs. Here is the code for TestControllerContext:

public class TestControllerContext : ControllerContext {
  public override System.Web.HttpContextBase HttpContext {
    get {
      return new TestHttpContext();
    }
    set {
      base.HttpContext = value;
    }
  }
}

instead of returning the runtime HttpContext (which doesn’t exist, remember) I’m supplying another hand-rolled stub. Here is that code:

public class TestHttpContext : HttpContextBase {
  public override System.Security.Principal.IPrincipal User {
    get {
      return new TestPrincipal();
    }
    set {
      base.User = value;
    }
  }
}

again, same principal :) because I’m concerned about calling into User for the Identity.Name property, I return another stub that implements IPrincipal. Here is that code:

public class TestPrincipal : IPrincipal{
  public IIdentity Identity {
    get { return new GenericIdentity("[email protected]"); }
  }
  public bool IsInRole(string role) {
    throw new NotImplementedException();
  }
}

now, when the controller code that was calling User.Identity.Name is tested, it will return the name [email protected]. Line 11 of the test code above asserts the test passes because if an error occurred, I would redisplay the form with errors shown using the View() method. A redirect says that the change password op worked:

if (MembershipService.ChangePassword(User.Identity.Name, currentPassword, newPassword))
  return RedirectToAction("ChangePasswordSuccess");

hth.