Hello
I am working on a project using the Active Directory, intensively. I set up a few unit tests for several things against the AD, some of which I achieve using mocked objects, some which I achieve through real calls against the AD.
As one of the functions of my project, I have to retrieve a so called "user profile". This user profile consists mostly of simple attributes, like "cn", "company", "employeeid", etc. However, one property that I am trying to fill is not a simple one "NextPasswordChangeDate".
To the best of my knowledge, the only way to get this, is by getting the domain policy's maxPwdAge and use this information together with pwdLastSet.
Now my question: How can I unit test this in an intelligent way? I came up with three options, all of which are not great:
- Use my own account as the searched account, find out the date by other means and hard code it in the unit test. By this way, I can unit test my code well, but every month, I have to change the unit test, because I changed my password.
- Use some account that has password never expires set. This is kind of pointless, because I cannot really test the correctness of my code by that.
- Use a mock object and make sure that the correct API calls happen. This option allows to test the correctness of the function's behaviour, but then the tested logic is in fact in the unit test and hence I cannot be sure, that it is doing the right thing, even if the test is passed.
Which of the three do you suggest? Or maybe you have a better option?