.Net Core Web API Acceptance Testing

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I am NOT an experienced .Net developer. In this quarantined vacation, my fun side project was to implement a simple RESTful APIs in 3 different languages which I am not familiar with. So the first choice was .Net Core.

While I was implementing the API, I enjoyed tolts of cool stuff comes out of the box with .Net Core Web API such as auto-generated API docs with Swagger UI, content negotiation support, response helpers and many more.

The only thing that I was not happy with is the amount of work need to be done just to get started writing E2E/Acceptance test (make a request to an endpoint and assert response)

After a few days of research, I could not find an easy way to seed test data to the DB. So I implemented my own way of seeding the DB influence by Laravel.

The basic idea is accessing DBContext directly from the test and seed DB with fake data with the help of Faker.Net.

BaseIntegrationTest class

using System;
using System.Linq;
using System.Net.Http;
using Blink.DbContexts;
using Microsoft.AspNetCore.Hosting;
using Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc.Testing;
using Microsoft.AspNetCore.TestHost;
using Microsoft.EntityFrameworkCore;
using Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection;

namespace Blink.AcceptanceTests.Controllers
{
    public class BaseIntegrationTest : IDisposable
    {
        protected readonly HttpClient TestClient;
        protected readonly BlinkContext DbContext;

        protected BaseIntegrationTest()
        {
            var appFactory = new WebApplicationFactory<Startup>()
                .WithWebHostBuilder(ConfigureWebHost);
            
            DbContext = appFactory.Services.CreateScope().ServiceProvider.GetService<BlinkContext>();
            TestClient = appFactory.CreateClient();
        }

        private void ConfigureWebHost(IWebHostBuilder builder)
        {
            builder.ConfigureTestServices(services =>
            {
                var descriptor = services.SingleOrDefault(d => d.ServiceType == typeof(DbContextOptions<BlinkContext>));
                if (descriptor != null)
                    services.Remove(descriptor);

                services.AddDbContext<BlinkContext>(options =>
                    options.UseInMemoryDatabase("blink-test-db"));
            });
        }

        public void Dispose()
        {
            DbContext.Database.EnsureDeleted();
        }
    }
}

AuthorCollectionsControllerTest

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Net;
using System.Net.Http;
using System.Net.Http.Headers;
using Blink.Dtos;
using Blink.Entities;
using Blink.TestSeed.Seeders;
using FluentAssertions;
using Newtonsoft.Json;
using Xunit;

namespace Blink.AcceptanceTests.Controllers
{
    public class AuthorCollectionsControllerTest : BaseIntegrationTest
    {
        [Fact]
        public async void can_fetch_a_list_of_authors_by_ids()
        {
            // Arrange
            var authors = CreateAuthor(2);

            // Act
            var authorIds = String.Join(",", authors.Select(a => a.Id).ToList());
            var response = await TestClient.GetAsync($"api/author-collections/({authorIds})");
            var data = await response.Content.ReadAsAsync<List<AuthorDto>>();

            // Assert
            response.StatusCode.Should().Be((int) HttpStatusCode.OK);
            data.Should().HaveCount(2);
            data.First().Id.Should().Be(authors.First().Id);
            data.First().Name.Should().Be(authors.First().Name);
        }
        
        [Fact]
        public async void can_create_a_list_of_authors()
        {
            // Arrange
            var authorsToBeCreated = new List<AuthorDto>
            {
                new AuthorDto() {Name = "Bill"},
                new AuthorDto() {Name = "Steve"},
            };

            var serializedAuthors = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(authorsToBeCreated, Formatting.Indented);
            HttpContent content = new StringContent(serializedAuthors);

            // Act
            content.Headers.ContentType = MediaTypeHeaderValue.Parse("application/json");
            var response = await TestClient.PostAsync("api/author-collections", content); 
            var data = await response.Content.ReadAsAsync<List<AuthorDto>>();

            // Assert
            response.StatusCode.Should().Be((int) HttpStatusCode.Created);
            
            data.Should().HaveCount(2);
            data.First().Name.Should().Be(authorsToBeCreated.First().Name);
            
            var ids = String.Join(",", data.Select(a => a.Id).ToList());
            response.Headers.Location.Should().Be($"http://localhost/api/author-collections/({ids})");
        }

        private List<Author> CreateAuthor(int count)
        {
            return (new AuthorSeeder(DbContext)).Create(count);
        }
    }
}

You can find the code here. If you see any problems with this approach. Or ways to improve the code, please let me know on GitHub, Facebook, Twitter or any way you can reach me.

Credits

Finally, I would like to thank a few people who shared their knowledge with me:

Via Youtube:

Via Zoom:

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