Firing UI control events from a Unit Test

Question

As a beginner to TDD I am trying to write a test that assumes a property has had its value changed on a PropertyGrid (C#, WinForms, .NET 3.5).

Changing a property on an object in a property grid does not fire the event (fair enough, as it's a UI raised event, so I can see why changing the owned object may be invisible to it).

I also had the same issue with getting an AfterSelect on a TreeView to fire when changing the SelectedNode property.

I could have a function that my unit test can call that simulates the code a UI event would fire, but that would be cluttering up my code, and unless I make it public, I would have to write all my tests in the same project, or even class, of the objects I am testing (again, I see this as clutter). This seems ugly to me, and would suffer from maintainability problems.

Is there a convention to do this sort of UI based unit-testing

Answer 1

One option I would recommend for its simplicty is to have your UI just call a helper class or method on the firing of the event and unit test that. Make sure it (your event handler in the UI) has as little logic as possible and then from there I'm sure you'll know what to do.

It can be pretty difficult to reach 100% coverage in your unit tests. By difficult I mean of course inefficient. Even once you get good at something like that it will, in my opinion, probably add more complexity to your code base than your unit test would merit. If you're not sure how to get your logic segmented into a separate class or method, that's another question I would love to help with.

I'll be interested to see what other techniques people have to work with this kind of issue.

Answer 2

Microsoft has UI Automation built into the .Net Framework. You may be able to use this to simulate a user utilising your software in the normal way.

There is an MSDN article "Using UI Automation for Automated Testing which is a good starting point.

Answer 3

To unit test your code you will need to mock up an object of the UI interface element. There are many tools you can use to do this, and I can't recommend one over another. There's a good comparison between MoQ and Rhino Mocks here at Phil Haack's blog that I've found useful and might be useful to you.

Anothing thing to consider if you're using TDD is creating an interface to your views will assist in the TDD process. There is a design model for this (probably more than one, but this is one I use) called Model View Presenter (now split into Passive View and Supervisor Controller). Following one of these will make your code behind far more testable in the future.

Also, bear in mind that testing the UI itself cannot be done through unit testing. A test automation tool as already suggested in another answer will be appropriate for this, but not for unit testing your code.