Unit testing - when multiple projects all have their own set of App_Config files

Question

Here's the situation:

I've got a solution with multiple unit testing projects, each targeting a specific assembly in the application. These unit test projects require a set of App_Config* files in order to execute (i.e. connectionStrings.config, appSettings.config, etc). When I run the tests from within VS.NET using TD.NET or ReSharper, as expected the world is good, however, when I run my NAnt build scripts to execute the tests, my build output folder which contains all of the assemblies, test assemblies, etc, does not contain any of the associated App_config* files.

I tried setting all of the App_Config file properties to "Copy Always" which works fine when there is a single testing project within the solution i'm building, however when multiple projects are all within the same solution and all contain the same config file names with different settings, the world begins to fall apart.

What is the best way to handle this situation?

Thanks

Answer 1

Manually rename the app.config files to correspond with the name of the particular assembly it goes along with ("assembly1.dll.config", "assembly2.dll.config", etc). Do this in the projects themselves. This will disallow Visual Studio renaming the files itself. Next, copy them all over to the output directory with their individual varied names.

Answer 2

In the app.config, instead of config sections themselves, put references to separate files using the configSource attribute.

  <appSettings configSource="Config\AppSettings.SupportTest.config" />
  <ConnectionConfig configSource="Config\DatabaseConnections.config" />
  <log4net configSource="Config\Log4Net.config" />

Then, have different config section files for each host, and in the app config for each test host change the indirect references to the appropriate file for each test host.

i.e., in the app.config for UnitTestHostA, put

  <appSettings configSource="Config\AppSettings.UnitTestHostA.config" />
  <ConnectionConfig configSource="Config\Connections.UnitTestHostA.config" />
  <log4net configSource="Config\Log4Net.config" />

and for UnitTestHostB, put

  <appSettings configSource="Config\AppSettings.UnitTestHostB.config" />
  <ConnectionConfig configSource="Config\Connections.UnitTestHostB.config" />
  <log4net configSource="Config\Log4Net.config" />

Answer 3

Just in case anyone is interested in how I resolved this:

My resolution is closest to what Charles and David suggested regarding renaming my config files specific to the test assembly however instead of renaming each file, I opted for renaming the folder App_Config to [AssemblyName]_Config this way the amount of renaming I would have to do is very limited (in fact there is no other renaming to do).

Of course, I also had to do a find and replace in my main App.config file for all configSource="App_Config\" to configSource="[AssemblyName]_Config" (where [AssemblyName] is the name of the test assembly)