Use reflection to Recreate Object for Test

Question

Hi - I have a large number of C# WCF services that are being called by an enterprise system. When we encounter issues during development it can take a long time to reproduce the exact conditions on our development machines. Essentially we need to log the request using WCF & build an integration test based on the data logged. If the objects in the request are large this can take quite a bit of time.

I would like to be able to switch on logging/debug mode so that all the objects in the request are serialized into c# code. See method WriteCSharpToCreateObject. I would then be able to copy the code from the log directly into a new c# test. Here is my first effort - which kind of works for very simple objects. (The xml serilization does work) Is there any utility/library available that can do this? Is there a better way?

private static void LogRequestParms(params object[] list)
{
    foreach (var o in list)
    {
        SerializeObjectAndWriteToFile(o);
        string cSharpCode = WriteCSharpToCreateObject(o);
    }
}

private static string WriteCSharpToCreateObject(object o)
{
    StringBuilder b = new StringBuilder();

    Type myType = o.GetType();
    b.AppendLine(myType.Name + " o = new " + myType.Name + "();");

    PropertyInfo[] myFields = myType.GetProperties();
    foreach (var v in myFields)
    {
        b.AppendLine("o." + v.Name + " = " + v.GetValue(o, null).ToString() + ";");
    }
    return b.ToString();
}

private static void SerializeObjectAndWriteToFile(object request)
{
    using (System.IO.Stream s = new System.IO.FileStream("C:\\temp\\logRequest.log", System.IO.FileMode.Append))
    {
        System.Xml.Serialization.XmlSerializer objectSerilizer = new System.Xml.Serialization.XmlSerializer(request.GetType());
        objectSerilizer.Serialize(s, request);
    }
}

Answer 1

You could use binary serialization using the BinaryFormatter class and then deserialize the serialized objects in your tests.

Answer 2

You could also just serialize the objects coming in, and save them off in files (like you're already doing). Then in your test code, deserialize the objects from the files.