How to Test a Multi-Tenant App with support for multiple domains

Question

HI, we are building a multi-tenant application, which will support that each tenant can have a unique top level domain, the application is build using the asp.net 3.5 and SQL servr 2005, while each tenant will have different database.

I have seen a number of questions about the similar applications on the StackOverFlow, but none of them is related to the Testing, I want to know is how one can test the application in a development environment, specially

1. How can we test that each customer connects to his own DB based on the URL.
2. how can we emulate different domains on the local system. like abc.com and xyz.com all goes to dev machine's IIS.

Any recommendations which might help us in the developing process of such an application.

Answer 1

1. How can we test that each customer connects to his own DB based on the URL.

I'm assuming that, once the customer has connected, your application reads the database to get data used in rendering the page. In that case you just need to put some unique data into each customer database and then check that the correct data is displayed, preferably using an automation tool.

1. how can we emulate different domains on the local system. like abc.com and xyz.com all goes to dev machine's IIS.

Edit the [Windows directory]\System32\drivers\etc\hosts file on the machine that you're testing from and add entries pointing to the dev IIS machine for each domain. For example, if the dev IIS machine is at 192.168.0.44, and its server name is iisdev, add:

192.168.0.44     iisdev.abc.com
192.168.0.44     iisdev.xyz.com

etc.