Like I already said last week, I have been dabbling a bit with NancyFx lately.

This week I took a serious look at testing Nancy modules and Razor views. Due to Nancy’s defaults and conventions, it takes a little while to set up Nancy in a test context. Then again, Nancy’s granularity makes it simple enough to set up a solid test infrastructure by replacing some of its building blocks.

Like always, I had to go through several iterations to get it right.

A first attempt

The first test I wrote looked something like this. This test simply asserts whether a GET request to the root of my application returns a 200 OK status code.

[TestMethod]
public void root_should_return_response_ok()
{        
    var browser = new Browser(new DefaultNancyBootstrapper());

    var response = browser.Get("/");

    Assert.AreEqual(HttpStatusCode.OK, response.StatusCode);
}

Assert.AreEqual failed. Expected:<OK>. Actual:<NotFound>.

Telling Nancy which modules to use

I figured out I had to tell Nancy which modules to load. You can do this by using the configurable bootstrapper, which gives you an API to configure parts of Nancy yourself.

var bootstrapper = new ConfigurableBootstrapper(with =>
{
    with.Module<RootModule>();               
});
var browser = new Browser(bootstrapper);

Running this test, I no longer got a NotFound result, but an exception. Making progress.

Test method RootModuleTests.root_should_return_response_ok threw exception: 
System.Exception: ConfigurableBootstrapper Exception ---> 
                    Nancy.RequestExecutionException: Oh noes! ---> 
                    Nancy.ViewEngines.ViewNotFoundException: Unable to locate view 'HomeView'
Currently available view engine extensions: sshtml,html,htm
Locations inspected: HomeView,views/HomeView,views/HomeView,/HomeView,views/Root/HomeView,Root/HomeView

Where is the view engine?

On inspecting the exception, I noticed that the cshtml view engine extension was missing from the list.

To add the view engine, you can just add a reference to the Nancy.ViewEngines.Razor assembly. Nancy will pick up the new engine automatically.

Test method RootModuleTests.root_should_return_response_ok threw exception: 
System.Exception: ConfigurableBootstrapper Exception ---> 
                    Nancy.RequestExecutionException: Oh noes! ---> 
                    Nancy.ViewEngines.ViewNotFoundException: Unable to locate view 'HomeView'
Currently available view engine extensions: sshtml,html,htm,cshtml,vbhtml
Locations inspected: HomeView,views/HomeView,views/HomeView,/HomeView,views/Root/HomeView,Root/HomeView

Locating the views

This time around we get a slightly different exception; the razor view engine extension is available, but Nancy is still having trouble finding the views - which is normal. Nancy is running in a different context now, so the default rootpathprovider will return the wrong path. Implementing another one is children’s play.

public class TestRootPathProvider : IRootPathProvider
{    
    public string GetRootPath()
    {
        return "C:\MyProject\";
    }
}

I discovered that you don’t even need to use the configurable bootstrapper to override the IRoothPathProvider; Nancy seems to pick up the new implementation by herself.

The hardcoded path will work on your machine, but not on the build server. In my second iteration, I made the implementation smarter by traversing my way through parent directories looking for my views folder - starting from my tests out folder all the way up to my web application folder.

public class TestRootPathProvider : IRootPathProvider
{
    private static string _cachedRootPath;

    public string GetRootPath()
    {
        if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(_cachedRootPath))
            return _cachedRootPath;

        var currentDirectory = new DirectoryInfo(Environment.CurrentDirectory);
        
        bool rootPathFound = false;            
        while (!rootPathFound)
        {
            var directoriesContainingViewFolder = currentDirectory.GetDirectories(
                        "Views", SearchOption.AllDirectories);
            if (directoriesContainingViewFolder.Any())
            {
                _cachedRootPath = directoriesContainingViewFolder.First().FullName;
                rootPathFound = true;
            }

            currentDirectory = currentDirectory.Parent;
        }

        return _cachedRootPath;
    }
}

Result: Passed

I was happy to find out that this technique works for the MSTest runner, NCrunch and Appharbor.

There is one more way you can go at this though, which works and maybe even is the ‘recommended’ technique, but also is a lot more cumbersome: use the DeploymentItem attribute to copy the views folder to your tests out folder.

To recapitulate

I hope this post documented some useful techniques to get started testing Nancy’s modules and views:

1. Use the configurable bootstrapper to add your modules
2. Reference the correct view engine
3. Implement a rootpathprovider telling Nancy where it can find her views

Only a few days ago, @thecodejunkie made a ticket on GitHub addressing some of these issues. I’m pretty confident we can smooth out these rough edges to make Nancy tests also walk the super-duper-happy-path.