JustMock outside of unit testing?

[TonyG]

I confess up front that of all of the hundreds of skills I've had to learn over the years, at this point I'm still not up on unit testing.  I haven't used the tools once, haven't read a book or done my homework on this one, and don't know AAA from the company that tows my car.  In JustMock I think I see a tool that can help with common development.  I just don't want to have to research another paradigm like unit testing (yet) in order to use what seems like a great tool.  But all of the examples seem to be completely based on unit testing.

Here is an example of how I'd like to use JustMock.  I have an ASP.NET app that makes synchronous WebRequests out to other sites to aggregate results.  My code might look something like this:

IList<ClassA> GetGridData(string info) {
  IList<ClassA> list  = LibraryX.DoSomething(info);  // web request done in here
  if (list.Count == 0)
    list = null;
  return list;
}

The problem is that I in testing through Visual Studio I don't have the live web server environment, and I don't want to have to do a live call through LibraryX to get a IList<ClassA> that I need elsewhere in my code.  It would be great if I could generate that list without having to write the manual code to generate N instances of ClassA.  The issue is compounded when ClassA is sealed and instances are constructed internally in LibraryX, and I actually can't manually create those instances anyway without a lot of grief.

So can I do something like this?

IList<ClassA> GetGridData(string info) {
#if Testing
   IList<ClassA> list  = Mock.Create<IList<ClassA>>(info);
// or....
   IList<ClassA> list = Mock.Create<LibraryX.ClassAFactory>().DoSomething(info);
#else
  IList<ClassA> list  = LibraryX.ClassAFactory.DoSomething(info);  // web request done in here
#endif
  if (list.Count == 0)
    list = null;
  return list;
}

As I see it, JustMock doesn't seem to have the tools it needs to create a mock list of ClassA objects ... or maybe that's exactly what JustMock is great at doing!?  I really don't know because I'm not "getting" this from any of the documentation.  Is there something else that does what I want here?  Or is the universal solution still to just lump it and do it all manually?

Thanks!

[Ricky]

Hi Tony,
Thanks again for bringing up the question. Actually, if you have to get through the following code:

IList<ClassA> GetGridData(string info) {

  

  IList<ClassA> list  = LibraryX.DoSomething(info);  // web request done 
  if (list.Count == 0)

    list = null;

  

  return list;

  

}

Indeed, you can do something like this :

Mock.Arrange(() => LibraryX.DoSomething(expectedInfo).ReturnsCollecton(myFakeList);

Here when GetGridData(expectedInfo) is invoked with an expected argument it will return your fake colllection instead of doing a web request to fetch the same.

However, JustMock is testing tool. So doing such is best recommended inside a test class. This is also the goal that will make testing a portion of your code easy without worrying about disk or webserver.


Hope this information helps.
 

Kind Regards,
Mehfuz
the Telerik team